The XQ Expert Series€¦ · We call them capstones. And each student does four capstones in ninth grade and four again in 10th grade. Those are authentic transdisciplinary projects

The XQExpert SeriesNetworks & PartnershipsHear from leaders who tapped into communities that expanded the traditional classroom.

01/16/16

The XQ Expert Series: Networks & Partnerships | 1

The XQ Expert Series: Networks & Partnerships

Michele Cahill: Hello. I'm Michele Cahill. And this is Expert Q&A, a

conversation focused on rethinking the American high school.

At XQ, we believe that high schools need to draw upon all

the assets in their communities, connecting students to expand their learning opportunities, social support, college and career. Today we're chatting about networks and partnerships with three people who really illustrate what this can mean in a high school setting.

00:00:28 Jeff McClellan's the founding principal of MC2, an

innovative STEM high school in Cleveland, Ohio, and an expert in partnerships that drive toward deeper learning.

[Aaliyah] Brown is a graduate of MC2, now studying

electrical engineering at Cleveland State University. She's working at Rockwell Automation, where she started as an intern in the 10th grade.

Stephanie Wu is senior vice-president of City Year, an

national service organization focused on education. 00:00:58 And Stephanie is an expert on youth development and

learning and what works in program design.


To start us off, Jeff, can you tell us about MC2? How is it different from what most people imagine when they hear the term high school?

Jeff McClellan: Well, MC2 STEM high school doesn't exist in the one

school building. Ninth grade takes place inside the Great Lakes Science Center.

00:01:21 Tenth grade is actually on GE's world headquarters for

lighting, which is located in East Cleveland, almost 11 miles from the ninth grade location. And then when students get to 11th and 12th grade, they're home based on Cleveland State University's campus, but out in lots of different experiences.

Michele Cahill: Aaliyah, it sounds like your high school experience was

very different. Would you tell us about it? Aaliyah Brown: As a student at MC2, you really get to take charge of your

own education. 00:01:49 Even beginning in my freshman year, we had the

capstone projects. And that brought real-world problems into the walls of the classrooms. And that helped the lessons to stick. In my junior and senior years of high school, I didn't spend too much time on campus, only because I was on the campus of a community college. By the time I graduated high school, I had a year and a half of community college under my belt, as well as two years at my internship.


Michele Cahill: That's really fascinating, and I want to come back to it. But I first want to bring Stephanie into the conversation.

Stephanie, what does City Year offer to schools? And how

does this impact the daily lives of students? Stephanie Wu: Our teams of young people deliver services that both help

the whole school in terms of strengthening the school's climate and culture so that the student body can have more experiences of self agency, the feeling that they can actually impact and address the direction in their learning path.

Michele Cahill: Stephanie, tell us in a little bit more detail what daily life

looks like in a school where City Year corps members are present.

Stephanie Wu: Before the school bell rings, as students are coming into

school, and teachers, that team, anywhere from 10 to 15 people, will be at the entrance. Everyone will receive a personalized greeting.

00:03:14 "Hey, I look forward to working with you in math class

today so we can tackle that problem," or, "I'm looking forward to working with you during drama." Then they will go into the classrooms, and they'll follow cohorts of students through all of their classes. The corps members are then there during the after-school period, in which they're providing enrichment supports, as well as academic supports.


00:03:38 And those supports will be designed and personalized based on what the learning agenda is during the in-school hours. One of my favorite examples is when I was at an after-school program, a club, and one of the corps members was really into golf. He wanted to teach the students golf. The idea of learning golf was something that they had never dreamed that they'd be able to do. So it was a really popular club.

00:04:04 In addition to teaching them the sport and having a golf

expert come in and taking them to a golf course, he also combined it with what was going on with physics. They thought about the trajectory of the golf ball when it's being hit, the effect that the dimples on the ball had in terms of the direction of the ball.

Michele Cahill: Jeff, MC2 is a great example of how -- powerful

multidimensional learning opportunities. Can you tell us in a little bit more detail about those experiences?

Jeff McClellan: A lot of the work that students do, especially in the ninth

and 10th grade, is focused around a common concept. We call them capstones. And each student does four capstones in ninth grade and four again in 10th grade. Those are authentic transdisciplinary projects that are built off of the standards that kids need to address in order to get credit, but also from a perspective of a professional in the STEM field and what they would actually do with some of those standards.


00:05:03 The speaker project, which we classify as the communication capstone, is kind of a really interesting example of how community partnerships and expertise of the school personnel kind of play together. At the beginning, with the teachers -- is we would sit down and we would look at our learning outcomes, and we would group the learning outcomes that seem to look like they would match. So, you know, this learning outcome in engineering fits with this learning outcome in math fits with this learning outcome in social studies and English and right down the line.

00:05:32 And then we would look for opportunities in the

community to connect to something that was happening. And there was a small company on the east side of Cleveland that had a small team. It had about five engineers there. And they dealt with sound components. And that's how we started to develop the speaker project. They came in and provided us with some expertise around how to utilize these different components to build speakers. And we had an amazing team of teachers that was kind of dually trained.

00:06:01 We have a teacher in the ninth grade who teaches

engineering but also has an electrical engineering background. And so he was able to very easily make the leap to this particular project. And then kids had access to fab lab components. The fab lab is a concept that comes out of MIT. And it's a concept of personal fabricating equipment that's connected in ways to other labs around the world.


00:06:26 So, for example, we use laser cutters, Shotbot, vinyl

cutters, 3D printers. And so different teachers would use the fab lab at different times. The art teacher used the fab lab and the vinyl cutter specifically for kids to create the logos for their groups that they were developing to -- you know, they were kind of like making a band to play the song through the speaker.

00:06:47 The engineering teacher or the physics teacher would use

components of the fab lab to etch into acrylic or cut through acrylic to create the housing for the speaker. And obviously the soldering irons and the wiring -- that had to be done [through] the lab, as well. So all these things are just tools that the kids used, as opposed to a standalone, okay, now we're going to go learn fab lab.

Michele Cahill: Aaliyah, what was that like? Aaliyah Brown: So the project was really fun. 00:07:13 And the way that they do project-based learning is kind of

how you might think. So you have this project or a problem or whatever focus it may be. And each subject pulls something from that project or that problem and incorporates that into the curriculum for those few months that you're working on it. So in every class, something about that speaker box was mentioned, or something similar to it.


00:07:42 So it made you excited to learn. Another partner would be The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, because we got to display our inventions there on the last day. Through this project, I figured out that I wanted to be an electrical engineer. And what was even more so surprising, this was done back in my freshman year. So it helped me to decide really early on what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.

Michele Cahill: So much of what you've both been saying really [have] to

do with so much rich learning in multiple dimensions. 00:08:12 And Stephanie, I know that City Year sees adolescence as

a pivotal time for learning. Can you tell me a little bit more?

Stephanie Wu: We see schools as having the potential to be places of joy

for students when it's done in the kinds of ways that we're hearing about from the MC2 team. Learning has the power to be very meaningful. It provides young people with a sense of power. Learning can also be adventurous.

00:08:40 And because students are in a community, it can also

establish a feeling of comradery. All these things can be facilitated and reinforce the learning objectives of our peers and ourselves as an entire school community.

00:08:56 And we're really seeking to help them see school as a

place where they can form their identity, just as Aaliyah realized that through her experience at the school, that this is what she wanted to do in the future.


Michele Cahill: Jeff, you talk very powerfully about what the STEM professionals are doing with your school, with the students as part of the school. It seems like you're also keeping a very strong role for the educators. Could you speak about that a little bit?

Jeff McClellan: I think one of the things that we realized early was that

everybody coming to the table has a certain specialty in their knowledge. And the educators -- we know our content. We know our curriculum.

00:09:37 And so when we're able to articulate what our challenge is

in terms of what we need to address to a professional who understands how to do their job in the engineering world or in the finance world, when the two can talk about their two specialties, then you can actually identify a very authentic learning experience for students that doesn't become too much of the academic or too much of the project without connection to the academics, which was really essential to us, because we really wanted to keep time as a variable and the learning as the constant.

00:10:09 In order to do that, we needed to make sure that all the

time spent on the projects and the work we were doing with internships still connected back to the content, so that we could keep students progressing through the traditional content, which they still need to have in order to be successful.

Michele Cahill: So how do partnerships actually work at MC2?


Jeff McClellan: Partnerships work in a lot of different ways. Obviously several of the partners have actually stepped up and become locations for the schools. Other partners take interns.

00:10:36 Some partners help us create the really engaging

transdisciplinary capstones. Others provide financial support. In addition to that, there's also opportunities because of our approach to credit acquisition, which is a mastery system that sometimes kids need extra time and other opportunities to learn. Or maybe they're getting ahead, and so they need other opportunities to move ahead, too. And the professionals can come in in multiple ways for that, too.

00:11:03 Every student at the 10th grade site has the opportunity to

receive tutoring from a GE volunteer. And since we're right on the campus there, the volunteers actually come over at lunchtime.

Michele Cahill: Stephanie, what do you think, based on your experience,

are the ingredients for a successful school partnership? Stephanie Wu: We work with 82 high schools across the country. 00:11:25 Our orientation when we're working with our partners is

that we all want the best for our students and not come in with any kind of preconceived judgments about what a school is able to do or isn't able to do. We also go into the schools with a very asset-based orientation, always looking for their strengths and their assets.


00:11:50 From that basis, we then co-construct and share a vision

for the school of what it means for the school to be successful. One thing that's really important to us is that City Year can only say we're succeeding if the school is succeeding. And I think that that helps us establish a real foundation of trust.

Michele Cahill: I think it's very important that you were talking about this

level of transparency and shared goal, because it is very challenging for community-based or youth-development organizations and schools to come together on making what each is contributing actually intersect and interact in the lives of the students.

Jeff, before you started MC2, you were a high school

principal in another district. 00:12:40 What brought you to Cleveland to design a new high

school? Jeff McClellan: Before I came to Cleveland, I was the principal of the

School of Multiple Intelligences in Lima, Ohio, which was part of a transformation program of Lima Senior High School. I had the opportunity there to work with an existing staff to redefine what high school would look like for one-third of the school, and had a lot of fun doing it. While I was there, I was invited to apply for the position of head of school here at MC2.


00:13:09 And although I wasn't really looking to leave Lima at the time, the opportunity to start from scratch with the amount of work that had already been done and the amount of partners involved and the opportunity to create the platform STEM school for the Cleveland region was just an amazing opportunity that I couldn't pass up.

Michele Cahill: What were the goals and outcomes that you had for

students? Jeff McClellan: From the beginning, the goals were pretty broad and very,

I would say, out of the box. 00:13:37 We wanted to create the school experience that actually

integrated the students' experience into the community. So it wasn't seen as school and readiness skills. It was all together, the same. And we wanted to use the entire Cleveland community as the campus for the school. So in ninth and 10th grade, the focus really was on mastery of some of the core competencies. And we broke those out by subject area and discipline. And we didn't change the names of the courses or do anything like that. They're the standard course titles.

00:14:06 But instead of starting with a couple different math

options, we started every ninth grader in algebra 2. And even though some of the kids hadn't even had algebra 1 when they entered high school, we started with algebra 2.

00:14:20 Then we really just committed to working on the learning

outcomes associated with algebra 2 and finding ways to,


when kids didn't get it -- finding ways to reintroduce it and re-support them and extend time to allow them to master these skills.

Michele Cahill: I'm wondering, Aaliyah, whether the MC2 experience

changed your views about science and math from middle school.

Aaliyah Brown: It taught me that science and math is more than just

sitting behind a desk and filling out problems and taking a test.

00:14:48 It's way more engaging than that. There's so many things

that you can learn about science and math and so many different ways that you can use it, instead of just writing something down on a piece of paper and turning it in.

Michele Cahill: Amidst all [this] exciting accomplishments, MC2 must

have faced some partnership challenges. Jeff McClellan: Yeah. We faced a lot of challenges. And I think one of the

keys is just always be transparent. We're never entering into a situation where we're hiding something from someone else.

00:15:17 And we're always entering the situation with a common

goal of, you know, how are we going to meet this objective? So if we're not meeting it along the way, we know it. We talk about it. We try to do whatever we can to improve upon it. And we just grow together.


Stephanie Wu: We believe those situations are really an opportunity to deepen trust between the two partners.

00:15:37 So if there is confusion or if there is disappointment with

the results, we really seek to sit down and have a very transparent and honest conversation about what we think contributed.

Michele Cahill: We believe that high schools should be portals to their

communities, that high schools should open up a much richer array of opportunities and what's often called social capital to and for all young people.

00:16:04 And this is especially important for students for whom

opportunities to access the wider world are often so limited.

Aaliyah, what do you think that young people have a right

to expect from their communities? What should communities also expect of their young people?

Aaliyah Brown: Well, young people have a right to expect that they are

important, they're wanted, they're needed even, and that they are a priority.

00:16:31 What the community should expect from the children is

some sense of interest and the -- and desire that a student will have to engage in their community, even if it's not something so direct that it's coming back and helping with the homeless or volunteering at the local church.


Even if they're able to inspire the next generation to make a difference in the community, it should be enough.

Michele Cahill: That's a really important point you just made on two

levels, one, what students can do for their communities, but also the notion of the reciprocity between what adults are offering to young people and young people taking the step to engage in something new and something different.

Stephanie, how does City Year ensure that all young

people are able to grow as both learners and as contributors?

Stephanie Wu: We believe that learning cannot happen unless young

people are engaged as contributors. An example I'll use is the way that we use data in our schools with our students. We use both assessments, and we monitor grades. And we have a lot of different activities in which we are sharing that data with the students.

00:17:43 We help them to learn to use data as evidence of progress

and to understand that by using the data and monitoring and seeing their growth and progress, they are capable of learning. Nobody is born dumb. Nobody's born smart. It's all a matter of effort.

00:18:07 And the more effort you put into something, you will start

to see results, the kind of results that you want to see.


Michele Cahill: Jeff, we've talked a lot about what MC2 provides to students. And we've had testimony from Aaliyah about her experience there and where it's taken her.

00:18:24 Could you tell us a little more about the students there,

the diversity of the population, the academic spread of skills when they're entering, how you approach the question of the outcomes for all students?

Jeff McClellan: Entry is not dependent upon grades or any behavioral

recommendations or interviews. Students essentially express an interest. And then there's a lottery to determine who gets in. The vast majority of the students live in the city of Cleveland.

00:18:53 But because Cleveland Metropolitan School District,

which we're a part of, has an open-enrollment policy, students can enter into the lottery from surrounding communities, as well. We are a close to a hundred percent free-and-reduced-lunch school. And we have students that enter the school highly advanced and above grade level. And we have students that enter the school well behind their grade-level peers.

Michele Cahill: Many schools that take a career orientation -- and

certainly the old model is that students who are coming in less well prepared academically would be on a lower track and less likely to be doing the kind of college experiences that Aaliyah was speaking to. How do you approach that?


Jeff McClellan: Every ninth grader in our school takes a college class. They take an -- part of their engineering class at the ninth grade is actually an engineering robotics class offered by Tri-C.

00:19:46 So right away we go over to Tri-C, Cuyahoga County

Community College. Every student gets a college ID. They go through the application process. And they start taking a college class in ninth grade. They continue to take these college engineering robotics classes every semester that they're in school. So even the students who may not be qualified by their scores for college in ninth grade get the opportunity to start taking these courses.

00:20:16 And as long as they continue to progress through the

courses, then they have the opportunity to continue to stay in them.

Michele Cahill: And Aaliyah, does it resonate with you in terms of your

peers, some of whom would have come in much less academically prepared than others?

Aaliyah Brown: The way that they pushed us at the school, it was very

motivational for everyone to at least get ahead. And for some, it was to get ahead and stay ahead. And that kind of sticks with you the farther you go, because you learn to welcome challenges.

00:20:45 And even if it scares you a little, it's still exciting at the

same time.


Jeff McClellan: One of the things that we found is the notion of social engagement, which is so critical to us as human beings. When you think of social engagement in the school, you think of kids engaging with their peers. And while that's really important, it's probably not the strongest feature of the school. What we do is we engage the students with people from the community.

00:21:12 At least one person from GE has built a personal

relationship with every student in the school. And the majority of the students -- that's not the only relationship they have. We had people near the top in some of the local foundations, like the KeyBank Foundation and the Cleveland Foundation, who -- kids had those people's personal cell phone numbers. I mean, it's amazing the kind of support and commitment that people have made to trying to create the best environment for the students at M2.

Michele Cahill: To conclude, I'd like to ask each of you if you have any

advice for the XQ teams as they're working on their school designs.

Stephanie, you've had an enormous amount of experience

with setting things up inside schools so that the teachers and your corps members, who are really nontraditional educators, can play complementary roles. Do you have any advice?

Stephanie Wu: One of the things we've learned is that it's really important

to be explicit about the very specific ways that the corps


member will add value to what the teacher needs to get done in the classroom. We're really clear about what kinds of skills that the corps members will come into the school and the classroom with and what they'll be able to do. We'll also be really clear about the materials and resources that they will be bringing with them, assessments, curriculum.

00:22:32 We like to have an opportunity very early on in the

relationship for the teacher to see the corps member in action, both when it comes to managing groups of students, as well as seeing them tutor, so that they gain confidence and have an understanding in what the potential of the corps member is.

00:22:51 The other thing that we do is work with the principals and

the districts to really think about ways that we can be embedded in the school community and the district community.

Michele Cahill: Jeff, do you have some advice on how to structure a

partnership so that all parties are able to work together and get stronger and more sustainable over time?

Jeff McClellan: I think the most important structural thing for making a

partnership work is to have something tangible that you're working towards, whether it's involvement in a capstone or tutoring students or developing an internship, which, by the way, is not an easy endeavor if you've never done it before -- but any of those things. The most important thing is having a common goal that's concrete and


tangible and that you can measure your progress towards that goal on.

Michele Cahill: I wanted to ask you one final question, Jeff, about

partnerships, and that's the three-way partnership between the school, the student, and their family. I've got to believe that there might have been some anxiety expressed by some of the families of your students. How did you handle that kind of partnership? And what advice do you have for people who are proposing innovation that they can communicate to families?

Jeff McClellan: If we're really re-envisioning education, then we have to

go into this knowing that it's going to be messy. It's not going to be this neatly lined-out path that you're going to go from A to B to C to D to E in a logical manner all the time. You have to have open lines of communication and a commitment to get to the end. But you have to also understand that it's going to look very different for one student to the next. It's going to look very different from day to day. And you have to keep focused on the outcome. And you have to have ways of measuring your progress along the way.

00:24:38 But you also have to be comfortable dealing with a fairly

messy situation. That's difficult for parents, a lot of times, because their children don't get a second chance to go to high school.

Michele Cahill: It seems to me that you have to be as open and honest as

possible about sharing what the theory of change is here,


how you're actually going to get students to college experiences very quickly, and that there will be support, and making it transparent that there is so that you're, over time, building confidence that the school is actually delivering on what it says it's going to deliver on.

Jeff McClellan: While I was the head of school at MC2, I can't count the

number of conversations that I had with parents about their child's educational experience as parents were trying to contextualize it within their traditional framework of education and high school. And I was explaining it to them as this future model.

00:25:34 A lot of times if we didn't already have some capital

established, if I wasn't credible and they didn't trust me, there just wasn't anything that I could say that would help the parent understand how their child that hasn't reached mastery yet -- any learning outcomes yet in a specific class, who's moving into the second semester, is still going to be ready for college at the end of four years. You really have to have an open line of communication so that you can establish trust and credibility early on.

00:25:59 You leverage that trust throughout the process of putting

kids through these extremely innovative environments. Michele Cahill: So that brings me to Aaliyah. What advice do you have?

How can high schools everywhere do a better job of helping students tap into the opportunities and supports they need to grow into well-educated, capable adults?


Aaliyah Brown: What I feel that high schools can do a better job at is to realize that no student is the same, that everyone has their own infinite possibilities of what they can bring not only to the school and their communities, but the world around them, and that they should realize that everybody doesn't fit into the exact category or they doesn't -- they don't fit that description.

00:26:42 They need to know that a student is just -- a high school

student, especially coming into the ninth grade, is almost like a blank canvas. And depending on the opportunities that you present to them and the way that you treat them and the way that you interact and engage with them every day -- it has a very big impact on what they will be when they graduate at the end of that four years.

Michele Cahill: Thank you so much, Aaliyah and Jeff and Stephanie. 00:27:11 I think this has been a conversation that will spark many,

many conversations around the country about the ways in which we re-envision high school and rethink high school so that we are building powerful learning environments for young people for their growth development and for their college and career futures. Thank you so much.

Thanks for tuning in to our discussion on networks and

partnerships. 00:27:39 We hope you found some inspiration from our experts.

Visit xqsuperschool.org for more information on XQ, the Super School Project.

Documents

The XQ Expert Series€¦ · We call them capstones. And each student does four capstones in ninth grade and four again in 10th grade. Those are authentic transdisciplinary projects