8/8/2019 CVHS Competitive Environment Snapshot Final Analysis

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/cvhs-competitive-environment-snapshot-final-analysis 1/2

What did I learn?

I’ve mentioned this elsewhere, but it bears repeating: the biggest thing I’velearned is that the move to personalization is the biggest trend in our market environment.

School designs like The Coalition of Essential Schools and schools like mine do a good

 job of stressing personalization in their mission and vision statements, and to some extent(at least considering my school), a decent job of attempting to put personalization into practice, but this talk and these attempts come nowhere near the kind of personalization

that school designs like COVA and The Big Picture Schools can offer.

I’ve also learned something interesting by looking at the “Multiple Measures of Data” chart in Victoria Bernhardt’s Multiple Measures, and particularly at the

intersection of “School Processes” and “Student Learning.” There’s a common sayingthat assessment drives instruction, but in looking at this intersection, it also seems that

assessments show us who we consider our students to be.

The Big Picture Schools (BPS), for example, have school processes that trulydeliver an individual learning experience for each of their students. It is no surprise, then,that their assessments, which fall under “Student Learning,” are all authentic, project-

 based, and built around the individual students’ desires and passions. If the black center of the chart shows us, as Bernhardt writes, “what we must do to meet the needs of all

students,” then the black center for BPS (where these two areas---“Student Learning” and“School Processes---intersect) illustrates that since every child is unique, a mass-

 production approach to teaching (i.e., worksheets) and assessment (i.e., Scantron tests)will not do. As individuals, students need individualized, tailored instruction.

At our school, however, our school processes (though we don’t fully acknowledge

this in our public statements) are still largely governed by a factory approach toeducation. We have a school-within-a-school system, but our class sizes are still huge,

and we still don’t know our students nearly as well as we should. And not surprisingly,our assessments mirror this approach: we’re still Scantron-happy and addicted to

true/false, binary forms of questions, instead of asking what’s true for the student and hisor her experiences and desires.

At our black center, then, we see students as undifferentiated and interchangeable,

and thus have no problems administering the same assessments to all of them.

What are the strengths and areas for growth?

I covered this somewhat in the previous section, but to reiterate: our strength is

that we have the ideals, and some of the structures in place, to achieve a truly personalized learning experience for all of our students.

Our weakness, though, is that we haven’t fully come to terms with the radicalchanges that a personalized approach to learning requires. This change isn’t merely

technical: we can’t simply say, “We do a school-within-a-school” approach with our 

8/8/2019 CVHS Competitive Environment Snapshot Final Analysis

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/cvhs-competitive-environment-snapshot-final-analysis 2/2

academies and then just blindly hope that everything else works out. Switching to personalized learning is an adaptive challenge that requires us to give up some power, to

truly put kids at the center of their own learning, and to give up cherished lesson plansand units for the good of all students.

What questions do I have?

Here are some questions I have after doing this analysis:

1. Are Big Picture Schools as good as they advertise?

According to their website, there are two in Denver: I’d like to check these outfirst-hand.

2. How could CVHS change it’s website---and leverage Web 2.0 tools---to create a

 persona that is fun yet serious, and playful yet meaningful?