Subject: Stocks in the School Model

Posted by Tim Joy on 1/23/2014
In Reply To:School Model Under Construction Posted by Bill Braun on 1/21/2014

Message:

Bill,

Thank you so much for the specific feedback. Exactly what I need to make a few moves.

1. There clearly needs to be more construction of the Student Learning portion of the model, including your note in item #4. At the UCLA Learning and Forgetting Lab (Robert Bjork) quite a bit of research has emerged that addresses means of reducing "the forgetting flow." It's been on my mind and will be addressed in future iterations.

What you describe as the extraneous forces in students' lives is certainly true of the students at our school, where 75% qualify for The Federal Free and Reduced, whose lives are chaotic. We have found some ways to mitigate those, but the effort expended to do that is great and not easily sustained. I agree that these forces, too, need to be added.

2. These comments about the Curriculum strand help me a lot and also raise a few questions. I did, in fact, make the generous assumption that the equation for Increasing was as you described, knowing full well that normalized growth is not what happens in a real classroom, there being so much variability with teachers, students and content.

What I am struggling with is this: knowing there are considerable variables to capture, first, where does does one start; and, second, how does one plan the steps for the construction of such complexity?

I suspect I need to revisit my purpose for building the model in the first place. I am thinking about school change, and my tack so far has been to push aside variables and identify core forces and influences. My 30 years in schools as teacher and administrator have been at two quite different places (a high-achieving, affluent and homogenous Catholic high school and an inner city, high-poverty, racially diverse Catholic high school); consequently, I am trying draft broad strokes of a model that captures the means of change in both places.

Am I off base in this approach?

Thanks,

Tim