A productive partnership

I was pleased to welcome a small but engaging group of parents to our final Coffee conversation of the year yesterday.  We discussed two related topics that had surfaced in our survey on excellence, namely, high ability students and contemporary instructional resources.

Our Coffees always begin with information, so we started by taking a look at how the school defines and identifies high ability students and how our instructional approaches serve this population of students that seeks intellectual, creative, or leadership challenge.

Our discussion about approaches was a perfect segue into our conversation on instructional resources.  Questions about our rationale for using a variety of selected and created learning materials instead of the more familiar textbooks comes up periodically.  It's an important question because the reason is germane not only to our mission, but to our responsibility to inspire all of our students - even those at the highest levels of ability.  So here it is:  the reason we haven't invested in textbooks in recent years is namely because textbooks offer us a publisher-directed scope and sequence that is neither accountable to our course standards or to the unique needs and interests of our students.  Additionally, published resources focus on what we call lower order thinking and, in the rapidly exploding world of information, can be practically outdated by the time they're in print.

The demands of our Life Smart brand call for problem-based, project-based, applied thinking that is personalized, relevant, and targeted to preparation for a complex future. Simply stated, it is impossible to achieve this mission with a single packaged textbook series.

With our rationales on the table, we moved to an engaging discussion of how the school can improve its partnership with parents in pursuit of these noble goals.  Relative to instructional resources, parents expressed that they are seeking more direction in supporting their children's achievement of these more rigorous outcomes.  Two very specific requests toward this end were made:  first, that teachers share the curated websites that their children are using for class research in the same way that textbooks would have been sent home in the past; and secondly, that the school assure accountability to consistent and transparent expectations for the information that parents can expect to find on class websites and blogs.

Regarding learner abilities, parents endorse continued movement away from whole-class instruction and formulaic assignments and request more detailed information on our professional appraisal of their children's performance, especially as it relates to reading levels and observations of their children's unique talents.

The parents who participated in our conversation on Wednesday affirmed the effectiveness of our instructional approaches and the direction of school growth.  They are anxious for a deeper, richer knowledge of their children as learners and appreciate opportunities to engage with and support their children in this journey we call education.

Here are some resources that were shared at the meeting:

Bright or Gifted?

Taxonomy of Thinking