Reflection on "Is it Better the Second Time Around?"

Thursday, June 27, 2013 3:00am - Originally posted on MOC website

For those of you old enough to remember "Better the Second Time Around"  is paraphrased from the title of a famous Frank Sinatra song "Love is lovelier the second time around"  (Van Heusen and Cahn- 1965) . So was High Tech High (HTH) going to be better for me on the second visit?

That was my musing before I arrived to spend four days at HTH being part of the Summer Institute.

Since our initial visit in January 2012  MOC  then became part of the HTH Leading Schools Certificate program with six teachers involved. This has been a blend of on-line conferencing, coursework and then face-to- face workshops. The Summer Institutute was for them and all their fellow participants the culmination and graduation. 

For me it was the opportunity to reflect on both the distance they individually had travelled and our distance travelled as a school community. Combining all this information should then enable us to have a clearer direction for the way forward for MOC.

Emily G, Katrina A, Ashlee B, Tom G, Emil Z with their certificates after graduation at Point Loma. Not present was our other graduate Candice H  who remained in Adelaide - the tired but very happy mother of Lincoln, who decided he needed to be here very early!

Since my initial visit MOC has implemented many significant structral changes based on our learnings. These include

• longer block sessions of time- only three periods a day, and sometimes whole day programmes.
• teachers working in teams including interdisciplinary in the Senior Years
• developing a more product/outcome focus
• exhibitions and presentations of learning to enable students and teachers to describe to the audience (parents, guests) the processes of learning that occurred.

I have previously written blogs about these developments - Reflection on “Audiences, Encouragement, Critique and Conversation” and Reflection on "Same and Different"- see Principal's Blog

This visit reinforced for me we are getting these elements in place for MOC. Students and staff have embraced the structural changes and parent feedback on the exhibitions/processes of learning have been that these are a great positive addition to our repetoire.

So what are the new learnings- well not surprisingly, they reinforced my original thinking that we are on the right track. As well they confirmed the continual need to grow teacher and student capactity such that our students achieve and succeed.

These are skills/capablities that in general we would want all our children and young people to have, what is different is that at HTH they explicitly teach or include them in their programmes through a series of protocols.

Examples are

• pursuit of excellence, need to draft and redraft to get better product
• critique - student led analysis of their work, and staff critiquing each others work
• project development and tuning by and with groups of teachers.
• student led conferences with adults- parents and teachers
• real world learning through community projects (Wallz Rullz is an example) and a different spin on "work experience".

I never want MOC to be another HTH just as never want to become another Heppell designed school - however we do want to learn from the best,

I believe we want to continually ADAPT to continually get BETTER to continually CREATE the best learning environment and outcomes possible for our children and young people. Thus over the next twelve months we will work at how we develop the "MOCster" versions of those other key elements of HTH. I wouldn't say it was better the second time around - just affiriming!

Next week , internet and weather permitting (114degrees here yesterday) I will post on my visit to the DelMar Education district.