CVCS Instructional Program--Draft

(Below is a document I wrote at the Board's request. It represents extensive conversation we have had as teachers and administrators about creating an instructional program for our hybrid schooling model. Eventually, the instructional program will guide individual programs, and the school's curriculum, assessment, and instructional practices will align with it. At this stage of the process, we invite your comments and reactions to the proposed instructional program for CVCS. BL)

CVCS Hybrid Instructional Program

Executive Summary

After four years of pioneering hybrid education, Chicago Virtual Charter School (CVCS) has had academic success as evidenced by the fact that the school has made Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) each year it has been held to that standard. The school has also learned how it can leverage its hybrid of virtual and face-to-face instruction to give more students greater educational opportunities.

CVCS recognizes that it accomplishes its mission when students succeed academically. Academic success at CVCS requires students possess foundational academic skills as well as independence, self-sufficiency, and responsibility as habits of mind. Students whose academic progress demonstrates they possess academic skills and CVCS’ habits of mind need additional opportunities and challenges. Students whose academic progress indicates they need more assistance need additional opportunities and support to develop their academic ability, habits of mind, or both. Thus the CVCS hybrid instructional model must provide:

• A greater range of learning opportunities for all students
• Extended academic opportunities for high performing students
• Systematic interventions within a continuum of services for at-risk students that creates academic growth and fosters independence, self-sufficiency, and responsibility
• Flexibility to meet the needs of high performing and under-performing students
• Face-to-face experiences that develop the whole child

To achieve this ideal educative function requires a facility that can accommodate it, and the current facility cannot support ideal hybrid education. This proposed instructional program for the hybrid instructional model requires more specificity before seeing what an actual day would look like for students or before determining how individual programs would work within it. An instructional program is meant to provide an overarching framework that guides the development of individual programs, which requires more collaboration with stakeholders.

Introduction

Now in its fourth year of pioneering a hybrid of virtual and face-to-face education, Chicago Virtual Charter School (CVCS) has learned much about the kind of learners a hybrid education can engender. A virtual education promotes independence, self-sufficiency, and responsibility, while face-to-face instruction promotes higher order thinking in cross-curricular settings and the development of social and leadership skills that provide experiences to build strong relationships with children and opportunities for remediation. Although traditional schools want to promote those values, build relationships, and remediate struggling students, as a hybrid school, CVCS is uniquely able to offer an education to students that will empower them to flourish in our complex world.

We have also learned that the facility of the school impacts the delivery of educational programming and consequently the school’s ability to educate students. The purpose of this paper is to take what we have learned from four years of pioneering and describe a hybrid instructional program for CVCS and then to connect that instructional program to facility needs.

CVCS Mission and Vision

Were one to read schools’ or districts’ stated mission, one would find a shared idea if not identical language. All schools exist for the purpose of taking each student’s potential and making more of that potential than would otherwise have been made in the absence of schooling in order for each child to more fully realize his or her ideal future in the next stage of life. After consultation with parents, teachers, administrators, and the Board, the mission of CVCS is “to empower students to flourish as individuals and as citizens in a diverse, global society.” On the one hand, there is nothing remarkable about our mission statement. There are two aspects of it, however, that tie directly to our proposed instructional program and to facility needs. First, we do not simply instruct students or provide education. Our mission is to empower students. That requires that students not only have foundational academic skills, it requires them to possess certain habits of mind. Those habits of mind include independence, self-sufficiency, discipline, and responsibility. Students who possess the foundational academic skills and the habits of mind necessary to be successful should have the ability to grow and pursue their interests and passions. Students who lack either foundational academic skills, virtuous habits of mind, or both, require extra attention in order to have the same access to their individual, ideal futures.

Instructional Design

The instructional design of the school must aim at empowering students and account for those students requiring extra attention. The ideal is for students to acquire the habits of mind and to possess the academic skills necessary to work as independent, self-sufficient learners. We believe that flourishing in what comes next, whether “next” is the university or other post-secondary education, the workforce, or high school, depends upon both academic ability and virtuous habits of mind, and all our efforts must aim at promoting those two things.

One way for us to measure a student’s habit of mind is by the degree of success in the virtual work environment. Students who demonstrate that they can work independently in a virtual environment require further challenges, and our curriculum provides those opportunities. These students spend part of their school week working in a physical school and the rest working virtually, and for them the face-to-face component of hybrid education should offer the opportunity to extend their academic and social development. Students who demonstrate that they cannot yet work independently in a virtual environment require intervention and a systematic series of interventions that would be increasingly face-to-face as students’ needs required. Because the ideal educational configuration at CVCS consists of students working virtually and face-to-face, our first interventions should be virtual in an attempt to put students back into the ideal virtual and face-to-face configuration as quickly as possible. In the event students do not respond to those interventions, the school must have the flexibility to be able to offer more interventions, some of which may increase the amount of face-to-face time. Those face-to-face interventions would be supported by various CVCS staff. With an adequate facility, teachers could spend more time in the school and be available to students more without compromising their virtual or face-to-face teaching. Moreover, an adequate facility will allow us to use grant funding for more instructional aides. Knowing that empowering students to flourish requires that we aim at independent, self-sufficient learners, the goal of these interventions must be to restore students’ place of work to the ideal virtual and face-to-face proportionality as quickly as possible. By offering more academic opportunities and in a systematic way, the hybrid instructional model can meet each student’s academic needs and foster the habits of mind needed for academic success.

The diagram below attempts to represent the continuum of virtual and face-to-face education CVCS should offer all its students. On the right of the diagram is the ideal configuration between virtual and face-to-face instructional settings, with one face-to-face block representing that portion of the school week when every student meets in the physical school. Those face-to-face blocks increase in the event that students are unsuccessful after virtual interventions. CVCS is defined within this continuum. Students who want a completely virtual experience have home school options and one day other virtual school options. Students who need a completely face-to-face learning environment to be successful have other schools as options where they can optimize their potential. At CVCS, we use the virtual environment to promote independence, self-sufficiency, and responsibility as virtues, and we use the face-to-face environment to promote cross-curricular learning and the social experiences necessary to flourish in a diverse, civil society. In this ideal model, we can increase the amount of face-to-face time as students require it.

From this diagram, one can see that in order to have the capacity to provide students with access to curriculum and promote virtuous habits of mind requires that we have a facility where students can be in the Learning Center for longer periods of time, but not in the traditional school sense of classrooms with desks in a row and a teacher in front. Aiming at independent, self-sufficient learners requires that the architectural form follow the educative function. Thus while we need classrooms, we also need rooms that serve as learning laboratories, remediation rooms, and other sites of independent learning activities.

Currently, our rooms do not permit the increased flexibility we need to give students who have not demonstrated the ability to work virtually the opportunity to acquire the academic skills and habits of mind they need. Rather, the current instructional design looks more like the following diagram.

In our current facility we have limited capacity to increase our face-to-face interventions for students who require it, and we are unable to offer high performing students additional opportunities at the Learning Center. Consequently, students who do not yet have the ability to work virtually are likely to flounder, while students who do have the ability to work virtually do not have the Learning Center as a resource for their growth.

Given our goals of providing students with the foundational academic skills to access the curriculum and of promoting the habits of mind necessary to become independent, self-sufficient learners, students beginning in grade three at the latest should be in school for one full day. We need more holistic and more reliable measures of student learning for all students in language arts and mathematics, but it is particularly true of students who struggle. One purpose of the Learning Center would be to verify that students have learned what it appears they have learned, not just by relying on objective assessments but by a more holistic approach to assessment. For students who are at or above grade level, differentiation of language arts and mathematics should capitalize on those strengths. Students who struggle with concepts should have the opportunity for remediation right then at the school, with the balance of the week spent virtually on practicing deficient skills and working on the other courses students take virtually. Currently, our ability to assess and teach mathematics face-to-face to those students who need it is limited. A full day of school would continue our focus on cross-curricular, project based language arts but expand to include mathematics and other activities that provide students opportunities to collaborate with their peers, practice responsibility and leadership skills.

At the high school level, the same ideal configuration of virtual and face-to-face instructional settings would obtain, but their full day would continue to include exploring post-secondary options while expanding to work during the face-to-face day in accomplishing daily assignments and work. High school students making decisions about post-secondary options need access to resources and print materials counseling offices typically provide, which would complement the career exploration they do virtually on Naviance. Again, the amount of face-to-face time a student required would depend on the student’s ability to succeed in a virtual environment, but the ideal remains fostering in students the academic ability and habits of mind necessary to succeed as independent learners. The purpose of increasing face-to-face time for high school students is therefore the same as it is for K-8 students, but the difference is that more of the responsibility to work virtually falls on the high school student. Our facility must give high school students access to adults who can work to increase students’ academic skills and improve their habits of mind. Moreover, the architectural flexibility required for K-8 students has to be duplicated for high school students, for the facility must have the capacity and be designed in such a way that high school students are separate from K-8 students. The similarities between the K-8 and high school program ensure that students experience a consistent educational experience as they progress through the grades of the school, but the special demands of high school students require that they have if not their own facility a facility within a facility.

There is another aspect in which a facility can promote academic achievement. One could safely say that children need positive affiliations in their lives in order to navigate through adolescence and into adulthood. School has the potential to promote those affiliations, and it does so in two important ways. First, schools are more than places of academic learning. Most schools have clubs, teams of all kinds, and other endeavors that provide students access to a social world that adults who have “made it” simply take for granted. These affiliations have the potential to reinforce the school’s academic mission by binding students more tightly to other students and to the school staff. We have learned that the positive affiliations we have been able to develop from spending time with students should be enhanced. Typically, these opportunities are offered after the academic school day has ended. CVCS used to offer clubs on Mondays, when there were no students in the Learning Center, which required students to take time out of their work day to come to school and which required teachers to give up time for virtual instruction and the other work teachers do to come to the Learning Center as sponsors. Having our own facility would allow after-school programming, and that means promoting healthy affiliations. Secondly, a school building offers students a means for constructing one healthy part of their identity. Identity differs conceptually from affiliation but functions in much the same way, by binding students and families to something other students and families and staff share. School culture grows out of school identity. A school should be a place where students can just “be,” to work, to be safe, and to develop.

Past Success and Future Areas of Growth

Looking back, Chicago Virtual Charter School has made Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) as specified by the Illinois State Board of Education every year the school has had to meet that standard. Schools that do not make AYP typically find that students who do not meet academic requirements are not distributed evenly across groups but tend to cluster in certain groups. Consequently, schools that have students in diverse demographic, language, ability, and racial groups make AYP less frequently. Looking ahead, the academic requirements of AYP become increasingly more demanding. This year, for example, 78.5 percent of all students tested must meet academic standards. Setting aside whether state testing is a good idea, setting aside the notion of testing altogether, the question would remain how to increase students’ opportunity to learn to allow them to pursue their individual, ideal futures. Long before there was state testing there were inequalities of opportunity and inequalities of success; to the extent that being literate and numerate impacts success as an adult, all state testing has done is shine a light on the manifestations in school of social inequalities. Thus our mission is to empower students to flourish, not to enable students to pass state examinations. But doing that with an increasingly diverse student population requires that we focus on what it takes for students to be empowered and to increase, extend, and expand our capacity to empower them. Our current facility, in its size and configuration, does not permit us to extend to all students, to the degree we would be otherwise be able, full access to our hybrid education. In our hybrid environment, a facility that allows us to empower students is one that enables us to accomplish our educational mission. We do not define school success by passing state mandated exams; we define school success by how many students we have empowered to flourish.

Next Steps

This proposed instructional program is another moment in the dialogue about hybrid education. It largely represents conversation teachers and administration have had the past several months as we reflect on our teaching and imagine the educational possibilities for students. We recognize that more dialogue is needed with more stakeholders and welcome it. This dialogue needs to become more granular as well because an instructional program is a framework that guides individual programs and other decisions that must be made in order for CVCS to achieve a consistency across its individual programs that at the same time aligns with its mission. Articulating an instructional program is only the first step.