NAIS - ONLINE ONLY: Spring Intensives at Berkeley Carroll

In 2013, Berkeley Carroll School (NY) initiated a Spring Intensives program. Two weeks were set aside for a suite of single-subject, cross-grade classes to replace our regular high school curriculum. It was an exciting innovation for students and teachers that sparked intellectual excitement at a dreary time of year. Since then, the program has taken root and blossomed.

As we have worked to perfect the program every year since to ensure that this innovation has sizzle and substance, our faculty has also been asking questions about educational excellence and intellectual rigor. Here is a brief account of our experience.

The Hurricane Katrina Mini-mester

In the winter of 2011–2012, the Berkeley Carroll faculty and administration were thinking about curriculum innovations. With the phasing out of AP courses, school leaders were entertaining various ideas, including one for a concentrated “mini-term” that would interrupt the regular school schedule for a different sort of learning experience.

We had an opportunity to take this idea for a test run in February 2012, when half of the senior class was in Europe on language-culture trips, while 10 students were in Granada and another 20 were in the south of France. For the remaining 24 students, we suspended regular classes and designed a special multi-discipline examination of one big topic: the Hurricane Katrina disaster of 2005.

All the teachers of seniors were asked to come up with ideas for lessons that would use the tools of their discipline. Some bubbled with ideas, others drew a blank. Gradually, with encouragement and lots of good examples around them, teachers created nine solid lessons. They ranged from “Levee Math” to “Mississippi Wetlands” to “The Red Cross Responds.” The seniors were split into two sections of 12, and each teacher taught his or her lesson twice.

In addition to these classes, teams of students researched specific aspects of the Katrina story—from schools to racism to media—and produced posters that summed up their research. A “gallery walk” that allowed everyone to read these posters was followed by a roundtable in which the students summarized their findings and a visiting scholar who led us in hashing out what we were going to take away from our study of Katrina.

Reviews of this experience were positive for the most part. Students were enthusiastic at the roundtable, and parent feedback was positive. When all the seniors got back together, we heard lots of questions from the French and Spanish travelers about what we had been doing in their absence. And we heard, “Why couldn’t you have waited until we came back?”

Despite the good feelings all around, there were some caution signs. One was that cross-divisional teachers had a hard time participating fully in the Katrina program. The school schedule is a finely tuned instrument, and it does not always respond well to mid-year tinkering. Another issue: Should students who did exemplary work on the independent projects be recognized in some fashion? Everyone was happy with abandoning grades for a pass/fail system, but some students made such wonderful contributions that it was hard for many teachers not to want to give them a special salute. Should they get not just a “pass” but a “pass with honors”? In the end, we stuck to pass/fail, but the question was to come up again in the future.

Creating Spring Intensives

Even as the Katrina program was being planned and executed, Berkeley Carroll faculty were thinking about the next step. The earliest meetings had as many as 20 interested teachers. One of our first steps was to look at what other independent schools were doing. We focused on two examples, Lawrence Academy (MA) and Harpeth Hall (TN). Both advertised their “Winterim” courses as an exciting break in the regular schedule and curriculum and offered a wide array of attractive options, most of them co-taught by two faculty members. Both schools emphasized experiential learning and the importance of getting out of the schoolroom.

We also discovered a report from 1969 by Macalester College dean, Jack Armstrong. Armstrong found at least 140 schools (including Macalester) using some variety of short, intensive learning periods, sandwiched between more traditional semesters or quarters. They had a variety of formats and names, but Armstrong deduced that the goal was the same: “to enrich or rejuvenate their education program by providing a special new kind of learning experience for the entire college community.”

This was exactly what we were seeking. We were excited and encouraged by what Armstrong listed as five goals common to all these mini-terms:

Narrow the focus. Depth, not breadth, matters most. Focus on a single topic, not five.
Create new courses. Let the faculty come up with new ideas. A mini-term could be an innovation laboratory.
Try new pedagogy. Experiment with new ways of teaching, new groupings of students, new texts, cross-disciplinary endeavors, a fresh approach.
Get off campus. Allow and encourage students to engage in social service, vocational experience, or international travel.
Do independent study. Let the most motivated students have time and space to pursue their own research projects.

Berkeley Carroll’s ad hoc mini-term committee immediately set to work fashioning our own version of this program. Some decisions were easy. We wanted our mini-term to coincide with our very successful travel programs, which always occur in the spring. How would this affect the school calendar? The first semester would end at winter break in December, and the second semester would begin as soon as we returned in January. The third quarter would run through January and February, then mini-term and spring break would fill up March. The fourth quarter would run from April through May. Thus, the Berkeley Carroll mini-term could fit into our calendar without undue turbulence. Faculty raised thornier questions about what a four-week interruption would mean for courses that depended on a steady progression of cumulative learning, but they were then put on a back burner.

Once we settled the calendar issues, the next decision was easy. A program in March can’t very well be called a “winterim.” We needed a new name. The English department regularly offered one-day “writing intensives.” We followed that lead and settled on “Spring Intensives.”

At a faculty meeting in May 2012, teachers put forth their initial course ideas. We were encouraged to think big, to be creative. Seventy-four ideas were collected that afternoon. Looking at that list now, one cannot help but be impressed by the burst of teaching energy that this new initiative unleashed. Proposals ran the gamut from steady and predictable (“Classical Philosophy,” “Computer Programming,” and “Geology”) to the eccentric and whimsical (“How Not to Be a Sucker,” “Casino Math,” and “Lost Causes”). Of the 74 proposals, 13 eventually became Spring Intensive courses. These included “Race and Gender,” which has since run four times; “Human Evolution,” which has run three times; and “Gettysburg,” which has run twice.

The committee put forward suggestions to the faculty about what a good Spring Intensive course should do. These guidelines obviously owe a great deal to the other schools we studied, and they overlap in surprising ways with the Macalester mini-term goals. They have remained our best shorthand guide to a good Spring Intensive course:

It should spring from teacher expertise and/or passion for the subject. Passion is necessary because the course prep is onerous, and teacher passion brings student buy-in. But expertise in the subject area really tells by the second week.
It should be tailored to a two-week schedule and follow the Goldilocks rule: not too much, not too little. Civil War battles was too much; Battle of Gettysburg was just right.
It should make use of New York City resources. The museums, the corporations, the media, the sports teams, the neighborhoods, the waterfront should all be our oyster.
It should address a gap in our curriculum or extend our curriculum in an exciting way. “Botanicals: The Art and Science of Plants” might be an example of a gap-filler in the biology curriculum. Working in soup kitchens in the Homelessness Spring Intensive could extend our social justice curriculum in important ways.

For spring 2013, we settled on 15 on-campus courses and three more designed to prepare students for traveling abroad. It was a success. When we polled students afterward, 78 percent said they had “a great experience.” A couple of typical student responses: “I learned a lot without feeling overwhelmed or stressed out,” and “It was a great way to interact with people who shared my more specific interests.” Teachers were also pleased. One reported, “My overall experience was very valuable because I interacted with students in such a different way than normal. I enjoyed working with a colleague in a different content area and moving outside of my comfort zone.” There were also cautions about readings that were too demanding for ninth-graders and low energy in the afternoons of long days. Teachers were divided on grading. But teacher satisfaction levels were high enough to encourage us to continue, and we have used the template established that first year ever since.

Almost all of these classes had more than one instructor. Berkeley Carroll has found the co-teacher model to be a good one for Spring Intensives. In the beginning of a course, one teacher often takes the lead, but if pairs stay together, they tend to become teaching equals. In feedback, teachers have cited this collaboration as one of the highlights of the Spring Intensives experience. Collaboration has taken several forms. Sometimes teachers from very different disciplines create a course that combines their fields. “Physics and Sports” is one example. Another true combo course is “Literature in a Lab Coat,” in which students studied both the romantic literature and the scientific discoveries of the late 18th/early 19th centuries. One teacher was from the English department, the other from science. Sometimes both co-teachers are stepping into new fields. “Robotics” has been one such course, taught in 2016 by a math teacher and a Latin teacher.

Not every pairing is a match made in heaven. If the co-teachers are a mismatch, it’s all over in two weeks. However, if it is a good match those two or three teachers will have a bond that can carry over into a variety of other school moments. They will gain new respect for their colleagues’ expertise and teaching abilities and look forward to joining them on committees or seeking them out for advice or just having friendly conversations at lunch. The co-teacher experience can also encourage efforts to develop courses with colleagues that span two traditional departments. In this way, the Spring Intensives can be a lab for bigger curricular changes.

Evaluating Spring Intensives

From the outset, the mini-term committee worried about “fluffy course offerings.” Our notes from that meeting insist, “Courses must be rigorous.” We thought that if the new program was perceived as spring-break-two-weeks-early, it would fail the students and Spranger the parents, and it wouldn’t last. However, “fluffy” and “rigorous” were—and still are—adjectives that resist concrete or consistent definition. We were asking teachers to create exciting two-week courses that approached teaching and learning in new ways in an ungraded format. How could we also ask them to adhere to the highest academic standards? As we were compiling a tentative course catalog that June and ruminating about rigor, Bob Vitalo, head of school, was watching from the sidelines. After complimenting our work and wishing us every success, he weighed in with a request that we create only “serious courses where our students are deeply engaged in thinking, writing, and reading. They should not be seen or characterized as a ‘break’ from the usual schedule; our students don’t need any more breaks. … We need to make sure that our kids have something extra after the two weeks.”

The committee took that admonition seriously, and with leadership from our division director we insisted on several components to assure serious courses:

We wrote a mission statement that stressed our goal to “pursue a deep and sustained learning experience.”
We asked teachers to set a concrete outcome, whether an essay or a presentation or a guided walk, for every course. We strongly suggested that there be intermediate assessments/expectations as well.
We asked that teachers talk with each student at the end of the first week to give them feedback on their performance and participation in the class. We created a sample rubric to help with this feedback.
We asked all teachers to write an anecdotal report upon the completion of the course, similar to the reports they write for students after the first semester.
We suggested that reading and writing homework be required of all students.

Nonetheless, the intrinsic differences between a course focused on building a theater set and a course focused on reading Dostoevsky mean that, at a minimum, “rigor” is going to have different meanings to different teachers. How do we compare book learning to hands-on learning? How do we compare in-classroom learning to in-the-field learning? Reflecting on his 2016 Spring Intensive, one teacher expressed the conundrum well:

“There’s pressure, from the kids at least, to always be out of the building or doing something capital-F fun. That’s hard to accommodate, and even when they seem to be having a good time in class, they’re still wondering why we’re not on a field trip, why we’re doing so much more reading than others (are we doing more reading than others? hard to say), why our class does so much work (do we do more than others? hard to say).”

Because Spring Intensives try to embrace travel experiences and experiential learning as part of the program, these questions about comparative homework load and different academic expectations persist. Several factors are at play here:

Teachers have different capacities to engage and excite through the long Spring Intensive days. Some have hit on winning ideas; some have not.
From the outside, classes can appear “hard” or “easy.” This may or may not be true, but it does influence student sign-ups and “customer satisfaction” during the program.
Class composition varies widely from those filled with the most mature students to others populated with the least mature students, as a result of random selection.
Some classes lend themselves to lots of trips and projects and movies; others require focused reading and writing.

Overcoming these challenges to equal academic rigor is an ongoing process. Every year we survey teachers and students and review the results to discuss what went well and what didn’t. We are in general agreement that the Spring Intensives program has been good for Berkeley Carroll. We have adapted the mini-term model and introduced it with wide student, parent, and faculty support. It is a curriculum innovation that has encouraged more innovation, and it works to breach the wall between sciences and humanities and between the schoolroom and the community. But Bob Vitalo’s admonition to teach only “serious courses where our students are deeply engaged in thinking, writing, and reading” set a high standard. We need to continue to encourage our teachers to design and teach academically demanding classes and our students to take them seriously.

Are Spring Intensives really doing school in a better way? Here are two thoughtful answers to that question from our 2014 teacher survey:

“I think a well-designed, two-week course has the potential to be superior to two weeks of regular classes, but I don’t think we lived up to that with this particular course. It’s something to strive for, and I hope to plan an Intensive next year that will give students an exceptional experience.”

“Definitely equal to and in some ways superior—because of the depth, because of the ‘real life’ lessons available. I think kids may remember their Intensives longer than they will remember many of their standard classes.”