Charter schools can be a great mechanism for fostering innovative curricula and instructional methods. But at my school, getting the students to buy in has been one of the biggest obstacles.
Nearly three years ago, I wrote what I thought would be my final Teachers' Lounge entry. I was leaving the classroom after five years of teaching high school history, planning on getting my master's degree in sport management and higher education administration at Auburn University before starting a new career in college athletics.
After two years as a graduate assistant in Auburn's athletic department, though, I discovered that I hated the monotony and trivial nature of a lot of what I was doing. Three months before I graduated I sent a message to my friend Eric Grunden, a chemistry teacher at the nationally-renowned Raleigh Charter High School, telling him that I was considering going back into the classroom. "Come back to North Carolina," he told me. "I'm opening a new STEM-focused charter school and I'm the principal." It's good to know people.
So now I'm the lead history teacher and director of athletics - I get to use my degree after all! - at the brand-spanking-new Research Triangle High School in Durham. It's pretty different from the large suburban high school near Charlotte where I used to teach. Whereas my old school had over 1,600 students, this year we only have 150 freshmen, and we'll add a new class every year until we have about 420 students in grades 9-12. My old school had a sparkling building with tons of amenities; we're in an upfitted old strip mall in Research Triangle Park. We have no buses - students carpool from all over the Triangle or ride the city bus for free thanks to a deal we worked out with the regional bus system. We have no cafeteria, either - students bring their own lunches, and we bring food in for students that are on free- or reduced-lunch. It's a whole new world, but it's been incredibly exciting.
Every charter school is supposed to offer something that traditional public schools don't. In our case, it's the Flipped Classroom. The teachers record lectures and put them on YouTube, then the students watch them for homework and then do hands-on, project-based work in class.
That's the theory, at least.
We've encountered a problem at the school that we didn't anticipate: many of the students simply will not watch the videos. There's really no technical obstacle on the kids' side; we provide laptops to the kids who can't afford their own, and for the kids who don't have internet at home we put the videos on a flash drive for them. We also have a study hall period where kids can watch videos and catch up on work. Despite all those accommodations, we can't get a lot of them to put in the time to watch the lectures. One of my class's videos had 135 views - again, we have 150 students. So, the best-case scenario is that 15 people didn't watch it, but the nerds of the school probably watched it up to five, six, seven, eight times.
There are several theories as to why this is happening. First off, many of our students come from some very low-performing schools in Durham where they were not expected to do much work (that's not speculation - several of the students have come out and told us that). The Flipped model is also apparently difficult to adjust to for even our strongest students. I assume that they know how to take notes when a teacher is providing information in class, but in the change to online lectures, it's getting lost in translation. This was illustrated perfectly earlier this week when one of our sharpest students asked me in class, "When are you going to teach us something?" When I looked at her quizzically, she quickly clarified that she meant, "When are you going to lecture us?" So many students are conditioned throughout their school careers to think that teacher-centered material delivery is the only way they're "taught." Our mission at RTHS is to rectify that.
It's definitely a work in progress, but many of our students - some of whom were doing zero work in August - are slowly beginning to catch on. Just over ten percent of the students failed my class in the first quarter, whereas nearly twenty percent of them were failing when progress reports went out last month. The YouTube views on the videos are slowly ticking up. And students are being more resourceful with their time during study hall.
I've begun a new blog, Second Time Rookie, to document my return to the classroom and all the cool stuff we're doing at RTHS this year, and if you're interested, I hope you'll follow along. It's been a challenging year thus far, but it's been a pleasure to watch this school grow, and I think our school - and the students - have amazing potential.