Communication is Key

We knew early on that trying out two fairly radical ideas such as self-paced and gradeless was going to require a lot of prep work and a lot of conversation. The three of us would all need to be on the same page and would need to consult regularly throughout the year to make sure that resources were being constructed, working smoothly, and continuously updated.

We met two times over the summer, and touched on many different subjects. First we devised the learning outcomes--specific to the self-paced model--that we wanted students to achieve, and then we talked about communication. Communication among ourselves, but mainly to parents, students, guidance counselors, and administration. We drafted a letter to parents, which can be found here, and wrote up our course outline for the students. Additionally, I had a few conversations with our Vice Principal. I also met with our guidance department to explain what we were doing and to field any questions.

We also spent our summer mapping out what we wanted the year to look like in terms of the student’s tech interface and our own communications. We decided on using Canvas as our learning management system, as Emma had a lot of experience with using that in her self-paced program from her previous school.

Over the first week and a half of the school year, we have learned just how critical communication and organization is--so much so that we decided to use todoist, a digital to-do list/organizer to help keep track of who was going to take on which content generation (for each stage, there are as many as 20-25 items that have to be created, and we are breaking our curriculum into 20 stages).

One thing we learned over the first two weeks was that the boys were going to need much more guidance with how to maneuver through the material than we had anticipated. We generated a stage checklist that broke down each activity into its smaller parts, and then included whether it was a submission only to Canvas, or if it had to be posted on the student’s portfolio as well.

We have also learned that--even though we spent the first few class periods in a traditional, teacher-led format--we will want to scaffold our introduction a little bit better. The way our Stage 1 was laid out, content and activity-wise, it was perhaps too robust for the students to adjust to quickly enough. We have been talking about creating a Stage 0 for next year that cuts back on activities (only providing one of each type), to provide a smoother, scaled-back introduction to how the course will operate in a self-paced atmosphere. It is important to optimize those first few days because it really sets the tone for the self-paced nature of the class.

As with any new experiment, tinkering is to be expected, and we already have some ideas for how to tinker with next year.