Module 2: III.) Protagonist Schools on Ideal Student Learning Environment

Now, kipp, LA Navigator, and Summit have spent a lot of time thinking about how to design the ideal student experience. And it's worth hearing from them about how they thought about this.

The ideal student learning experience here at Denali all starts with a culture of high expectations that allows students. That puts the students in the driver's seat for their own learning. This means that from the moment they walk in the door to all the time they're spending in our building, that they know that there's high expectations for them for academic growth, but also for character development. And as teachers and as leaders at the school, it's our job to really facilitate their growth and all of that, but mostly to facilitate their ability to direct their own learning.

The ideal learning environment for kids would be where they can work at their own pace and aren't set to, like, this is what you're going to learn in this amount of time. And if you don't learn it, too bad. And if you do learn it great, you're gonna be up to pace. And so I wanted an environment where kids can learn at their own speed and at the same time, like, get the supports they need and have projects to support their learning. So it's not just like rote memorization or like, spit out the information, but, like, apply what you've learned to situations in the world.

We are trying to both challenge each kid individually on learning the content that they need to learn when they're ready for it in a way that's just right for them. But we're also trying to create a place where they learn really valuable cognitive skills, those skills that go across the disciplines that are important no matter what type of work you're trying to do. And we really focus our time as teachers on those skills because we think that's what's most important. So it's really everything you see kids do here is very similar to what they do in other schools. But I think the biggest difference is we really separated out the two. There's time when they learn, work on content, and they're really focusing just on developing content knowledge. And then there's time when they're working on developing skills, and they're just focusing on developing those skills. And I think it really helps them focus on those two things, be really aware of those two things, and to the benefit of developing those two things in a very concrete, explicit way.

So I think the greater the variety in a student's day, the better it is for the student for many different reasons. Number one, student engagement is critical for us so we focus in on engagement strategies in the classrooms, in the computer labs. And by breaking the school day up into different chunks, you find even young, younger students stay much more engaged. It's almost like they're resetting themselves. They're going for 45 minutes in the computer lab, 45 minutes for reading, 45 minutes for a math class, 45 minutes, they pull out their Chromebooks and they're working in the computer lab. So it's all these little chunks that in a traditional classroom you don't really get because it's one teacher teaching all day long. And eventually that just becomes the culture of the students experience and there's not a lot of variation.

So when we were thinking about forming the school, the first visions of a school was that students and parents and teachers would understand that the second kids set foot on campus, that they are on a special place, that they are kind of, we would say this, they know they're on holy ground. And from then on, every single piece of the school was around high expectations for academics and for behavior. We realized that using, for example, the technology allowed us to have students practice perfectly over and over again. We could get multiple repetitions. For kids who needed that, that's simply all they needed was to practice. And the technology allowed us to do that.

So one of the things that I was sure of when founding Comienza was that when our students entered second grade, they were going to be at grade level. Now when our students come to us in kindergarten, they are years behind their affluent counterparts. So they're already coming with, you know, having not, you know, not knowing English, not having vocabulary, not having the support at home for literacy, for math. And so we're playing catch up. What we have to do in kindergarten and first grade is more than two years of instruction. We have to do sometimes three to four years of instruction in if we're truly going to get our students to walk into second grade at grade level.

When we thought about what we wanted for comienza, when I thought about what I wanted for my classroom, my primary goal is to make sure that my classroom is a joyful place where students are successful. So we create the joy by having school be a fun place. Have a school be a place where students are finding their passions, where they are achieving a lot, where they feel themselves growing. And that ties in so closely to the successful piece. They are successful because we're scaffolding them through all of their learning, because I'm interacting with them in small group environments to make sure that they're getting exactly what they need, that everything is differentiated. And when they are successful, that joy factor comes in in such a powerful way.

There's something that's often missing in these conversations and that's the students perspectives.

Take a listen to their voice.

When I get to go to my own speed, that means that like I could go fast at the things that I already know or slow at the things I'm having trouble at. But I think right now it's going really good.

This school is very different from other schools in a very good way. I think it's really good for teaching. Kids like stuff that they want to learn plus the stuff that they should be learning. So like you're learning the stuff that you should be learning. And then it's like if you want to do something else for fun, you can do that.

The teachers here that are doing is that they're like really focusing on the students and they're really like wanting to know about them and they want to make them feel comfortable and they want to make them feel like you want to go to school every day. I like all the programs they have. A lot of them are fun and educational. And I also like the different technologies they have. They have MacBooks, they have iPads, they have touchscreen computers. There are a lot of things I like about this school. My favorite thing about this school is just technology friends and the teachers and that's it. This school is much smarter. Like I went to Luigi and then I came here because I didn't like Luigi and then we got a higher score than them on the CST twice in a row. Then I'm like, wow, this school is awesome. I like doing all the work because then I get to get more smarter and go to college. So I like being challenged. You can't just copy off the teacher. You have to do your own thinking and that will get you to college. I want to go to college so I could follow my dreams to be a teacher like my mom.