On this trip, I visited the Boston Arts Academy (BAA), a public pilot school that emphasizes the arts through direct arts instruction as well as integration of the arts into traditionally academic subject areas. I also visited The MET in Providence, RI, a publicly-funded "district" of small schools that emphasizes extremely personalized instruction and uses internships as the focal point of the students' curricula.Both of these schools gave me things to think about; I think I was most impacted, though, by the MET. It is a truly alternative model of schooling that resonates with a lot of the values I've held for a long time but haven't known how to articulate. To give you an idea of the impact it had on me, here are some notes I took during the visit:
"I’m thinking about how to break down walls. Being in a classroom every day is too safe, I get too comfortable, and the tendency to revert back to the ‘default’ is too great. Kids feel it also—people like Andy should be rock stars, but they’re barely passing. The dangers of traditional schooling seep into those kids too.
We need to leave school more. Kids need to have more choices. I need to be willing to have less control. I need to be more transparent and more of a whole person, and I need to encourage students to be that too.
How can I bring these ideas back to HTH? How can other teachers get a sense of this without having seen the alternatives for themselves (that is, true alternatives, not just new names for the same things)? When we always get positive reinforcement from visitors and guests, it’s hard to see through another lens. Even here, amongst the most progressive educators, the questions being asked sound something like, 'But when do they learn math??' so it’s hard to imagine stretching so far outside the box when people are coming from that frame of reference."
