After I read through them all, he thought it might be better to just talk for a while instead of answering my questions right away. The following is what he had to say.
From my perspective, the label of Innovative Schools is sort of a straw dog at the moment. [To be or not to be] an innovation school is not the right question.
The school has gone through different evolutions over the years and went through a really big one about eight or nine years ago, when we added competencies.
That process took two years–while students were trying to figure what that meant for their learning, teachers were trying to figure out what that meant for their teaching style. The staff took a couple of years talking about what they expected from each other as teachers.
We came up with a set of competencies for ourselves which we’ve been rolling with for a couple of years. As teachers this is what we feel we should be holding ourselves to and what all students have the right to.
So that’s sort of where we’ve been for a few years now. As a school within the district, we’ve had different designations over the years. They’ve told us we’re an “alternative” school, and then they told us we’re an “option”…
It’s time for another deep sort of internal discussion of who we are and where we’re going.
Being an innovation school could mean a lot of different things, especially more freedom when it comes to scheduling, curriculum, hiring…
Some of that stuff we do already. We have a really different schedule [than mainstream high schools] and we kind of do what we want, and almost everything is different at Nova from other district schools except hiring. We can’t really get out of that one.
So these would be big things, if we didn’t have to defend ourselves about them to the district all the time.
But for me, the more critical stuff is the things we want to explore as a school: Multiple Novas within Nova, integrated studies?
I feel like this itself should be its own inquiry process, where we don’t have any answers but we just ask the questions and things [begin to] fit together. It doesn’t really matter whether or not we have the innovation label, but it’s time for another big change.
Personally, I completely agree with Mark. There are definitely potential pros and cons to being an innovation school, but I feel like we don’t know enough to be dwelling so wholeheartedly on the subject. I feel like a more important set of questions is who are we, who do we want to be, and how can we get there? And those questions and ideas are the most important product coming out of “Innovation Schools” discussions.
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