Re-Imagining The School Day For A Healthy, Engaging, & Meaningful Student Experience

 

Old School vs New World

What fundamental skills should a high school graduate have, regardless of the path they pursue? What skills, assets, knowledge, and abilities should students have upon graduation? 

Our children are inheriting a fast-paced world with AI and online education at their fingertips. At the same time, mental health issues and academic pressure in high-achieving neighborhoods are destroying their childhood; conversely, absenteeism is crushing the potential of students in under-resourced neighborhoods.

Yet, for over a century, the basic structure of the school day and week has stayed the same – organized around six or seven periods a day, five days a week, with each period lasting 40 to 60 minutes; it’s a model playing out in schools everywhere with slight variations.

Are educators, parents, legislators, employers, and students willing to set new educational goals and hold themselves accountable to achieving them?

At an April 4 American Community Media briefing, experts discussed the imminent need to rethink the basic structure of the school day to better meet the demands of 21st-century students and the modern educational ecosystem.

Keeping students engaged

One of the positive things to came out of the pandemic was that everybody wanted to get back to school, said Dr. Louis Friedberg, a longtime education journalist and former editor of EdSource at the American Community Media briefing, Reimagining the School Day. Yet keeping kids engaged in school is a huge challenge, he added.  

“The current structure and learning opportunities that we’re offering students are not working or not working sufficiently for young people to get up every morning and to say they want to go to school.” 

Instead, educators have seen chronic absenteeism rates reach record highs. While things have improved a little in the last year, said Dr. Friedberg, attendance has not gone back to previous levels. 

“What happened to all that excitement?” 

The Carnegie Unit

Since it was first introduced in 1906, the Carnegie Unit—commonly referred to as the “credit hour” in higher education—has served as the standard metric for measuring student learning based on time spent in instruction.

In high schools, one Carnegie Unit generally equates to about 120 hours of classroom time, with students attending classes four to five times per week for 40 to 60 minutes over a full academic year.

However, children do not all learn at the same rate. “There’s also been a growing recognition that there are lots of other skills that may be more important for how students succeed in the workplace,” said Dr. Friedberg. 

Skills like critical thinking, working collaboratively, being able to persist with a task, and showing independence are more valued by employers. But is there an effective way to measure these durable skills?

These are lifelong skills that students need, said Dr. Friedberg.

Five states (Indiana, Nevada, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin) are collaborating with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in pilot projects to measure these types of skills. Seventeen states are also producing what they call a portrait of a learner.

The Education Testing Service is also looking at ways to measure these skills and add them to transcripts (referred to as mastery transcripts), a model that receiving bipartisan support, said Dr. Friedberg. 

An education system for future careers

At Mountain View Los Altos (MVLA) High School District in the heart of Silicon Valley, Dr. Amber Woodward, hired in August 2022, introduced CTE pathways (Career Technical Education) to cater to a diverse student body, including those not bound for UCs or private colleges.

MVLA schools, ranked in the top 2% nationally by US News & World Report, sit in one of the region’s most expensive neighborhoods. Many students come from families of highly educated tech professionals, but many belong to working-class families in the service sector.

CTE programs offer a blend of academic and technical training, focusing on skills directly relevant to in-demand industries. They offer students a chance to explore potential careers and see how the concepts from core subjects translate into real-world applications.

Career and Technical Education classes are the future says the district website. “One size does not fit all, and we have to answer the demand of our community and industry to produce the job force that is needed in the 21st century.”

Building a CTE program

In an interview with India Currents, Dr. Woodward explained that creating a CTE program involved ensuring buy-in from both the administration and the community. It includes finding and credentialing teachers, and developing a master schedule. “You can’t just say – we’re gonna have CTE.. in this particular community, … it’s very affluent, and there was a strong push for AP, not such a strong push for CTE.” 

Teaching a CTE class requires credentials in that subject and industry experience in that sector in the last 10 years. Dr. Woodward jump-started her program by using teachers in the district who already had industry experience with credentialing.

The CTE program is based on industry sectors, of which California has 15, such as health science, medical technology, arts, media and entertainment, engineering, and architecture. Within each sector, there are three to eight specific CTE pathways. 

For example, Mountain View High School has an engineering technology pathway and an architectural design pathway that fall under the same sector, said Dr. Woodward. Los Altos offers engineering technology and engineering design in the same sector. “The engineering design is more heavy on the arts design, you know, right brain, and then engineering technology is more a little bit more techie math,” she explained. “Different paths depending on what students are interested in, which is one of the really beautiful things about CTE.”

Next year, a fashion and interior design pathway will be introduced at Los Altos High.

A CTE pathway requires a minimum of two classes in sequence – the first course is a concentrator, and the second course is a capstone class.

The MVLA district began with 8 pathways and currently offers 16. The district, with 4,448 students, has a 32% enrollment in CTE. Key pathways include engineering technology, architectural design, and healthcare. Dual enrollment credits are offered, with 380 students earning college credits as well. According to Dr. Woodward, there is a fairly even breakdown by race and ethnicity of students enrolled in the CTE program.

Preparing students for the workplace

The program is data-driven, noted Dr. Woodward, by industry, the county, and the type of job. They analyze projections in one-year, five-year, and 10-year increments to plan how best to prepare students, and ensure “we’re offering the right pathways that meet the needs of all of our students, regardless of their post-high school plans.”

In its previous iteration, CTE was called ROP (Regional Occupation Program), with courses geared towards students who were looking at community college and professions such as plumbers or electricians.

Now, CTE offers a broader, more inclusive scope of pathways. For example, one pathway has AP Computer Science for students who want to be engineers and need a four-year degree. But the culinary pathway allows students to get a job right out of high school. In the healthcare sector, the Patient Care Pathway provides middle-skill jobs for careers expanding in Santa Clara County and across the Bay Area. “A lot of them start out at six figures,” noted Dr. Woodward.

Working in partnership with Foothill College, the district’s CTE program is committed to “making sure that we are sending our students away with a living wage,” Dr. Woodward emphasized.

Internships in the school day

This year, in a remarkable outcome, the MVLA high school district secured internships for all health career students, built right into student academic schedules, Dr. Woodward explained. 

“What we did was in master schedule is that we have that class at the end of the day…..they are in class on Monday, and then the idea is that they’ll go out to their site either two times a week or one time a week, depending on the industry partner and how much they need them.”

Another micro internship was just completed with a global company over spring break.

Students are also getting dual enrollment credit right now through their college partner for both UC and CSU transferable credit. 

Empowering students to dream – and build skills to get there

Every Tuesday and Thursday at MetWest High School in the Oakland Unified School District, students explore their interests through internships at organizations and businesses throughout the Bay Area. There isn’t a seven-period bell schedule or lockers. In August, MetWest High will be 23 years old, but even with its unique pedagogic model, it remains unknown in the district. 

Dr. Shalanda Gregory, its principal, explained at the briefing that the big picture learning model is at the core of what they do. “We empower students to dream…and we actually help them to see that learning should be by your design.”

For instance, if a student is interested in becoming an architect, they identify criteria required for the profession, “and then we also try to find in our core content classes, which would be your standard classes, English, math, science, social studies.”  

Students at MetWest High receive core instruction on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and spend every Tuesday and Thursday in authentic work-based learning experiences with a mentor. “We call them community partners or industry experts, and..the student is being mentored by this expert in this field and learning specific job skills,” adds Dr. Gregory.

The end game 

According to Anne Stanton, President of the Linked Learning Alliance, the end game begins with a shared vision alongside the community about what they want young people to achieve from their high school experience, as well as plan a seamless transition to the next step. “High school is not the end game, right?”

But to accelerate such experiences for young people, teachers need time to plan, rethink the master schedule, and deliver this kind of education. 

At MetWest High, said Dr. Gregory, they focus on the whole child and involve their families in the process. “I think families found a lot of value in that.”

At the MVLA school district, Dr. Woodward is excited about the expanded opportunities CTE offers its students.

“It’s okay for students to take a CTE class and to have a fun class that’s going to give them real-world skills – between those AP’s. That’s a healthy thing for kids.  And I know as parents, we want our kids to do everything, but I’m really hoping that over time, that culture changes a little bit for the health of our students and the future of our industry and our community.”