Transcript

The student success triangle: Jeffrey McClellan at TEDxCLE

a small school with a large footprint a 21st century learning environment those are two of the terms that were used in the founding document for mc-squared stem high school I'm Jeff McClellan the founding principal and I just want to acknowledge the fact that I'm very nervous right now I'm very used to creating environments in which students are doing amazing things and talking about the monster Jan and for me I'd much rather be behind the stage watching them than up here today but we have a very important story and it's one that I'm very proud to be able to tell in 2008 over 80 partners came together with the Cleveland metropolitan School District and outlined the document that would become mc-squared stem high school it was a school that would put kids in learning environments that were were sometimes sealed off to the students that would access this it was a lottery based school that would follow a year-round school calendar and would assess students based on mastery of learning outcomes as opposed to the amount of time that they set in classrooms the community of Greater Cleveland would become the campus for this high school with ninth graders attending class at the Great Lakes Science Center and working with the NASA Glenn Research Center and other stem partners as students explore different stem professions and start to understand what it might be like to see themselves in these positions in tenth grade students transition across the city actually into East Cleveland where GES headquarters for lighting is located there are Neela parks campus our students grow from the beginning stages of ninth grade of exploration through an actual project that GE engineers and volunteers put together that takes students through the entire design process that GE lighting uses as they're developing a product then at 11 to 12th grade we turn this inside out by then students have had experiences with partners that I've mentioned and several others through internships and shadowing and experience they're project-based curriculum in the way that I've described and they're ready to explore different options around the city so in 11th grade the city itself becomes the campus for the high school with students doing paid internships and companies like Rockwell Automation Turner construction Lockheed Martin GE Lighting NASA and the list goes on and on and taking their classes wherever is the best fit for them whether it's Cleveland State's campus or any of the other college campuses around the area or with us in our home base for eleventh and twelfth grade which is also on the Great Lakes excuse me is on a Cleveland State University's campus our students have had flourished in this environment and over the course of the first few years it became evident that something really special was taking place inside the walls of the school and inside the city limits where our students were participating in their different experiences when our first graduating class walked to the to the front of the stage in 2012 those kids had been offered over 6 million dollars with a scholarship money and every one of them had been accepted to college somewhere quite an accomplishment in any case but but even a greater accomplishment considering the fact that this population of kids was not accepted into our school based on any set of test scores or any interviews or anything like that all they needed to do was say I want to go to M c-squared stem and then they needed to work hard and put up with everything that we were doing with them to make it through not only were we starting to see the results of our students but others were started to take notice of what was going on in our school we were recognized by some national organizations and even even some visitors from international organizations were coming to take a look at what was happening in Cleveland the recognition spread and and you know we we received a couple different awards for the work that we did and and it was it felt really good it felt really good to understand that this vision that had been created collectively by the city of Cleveland in the surrounding communities with the Cleveland School District had really created a kind of environment that could produce the leaders for the 21st century that we would that we were pretty sure we could but there was this hollow feeling when people would leave and we couldn't quite articulate what it was that was happening yes the test scores were were good yes the graduation rate was high yes they're getting into college at at acceptable levels at high higher than acceptable levels and and yes there's a special quality inside the students that that you could see when you talk to them and when you when you saw their work we couldn't really explain that and and I'm here today to tell you we still haven't completely figured it out but we're starting to look at this through a one specific lens okay and in turn in true step with our school science technology engineering math when we are researching some of the pieces of schools and some of the things that kids need to be successful three things came up motivation self management and social engagement well three is also the number of points on an isosceles triangle and and for centuries people have known that an isosceles triangle is the strongest two-dimensional structure in engineering and what is it that we're really creating and what is it that's different about the kids that are graduating from our schools it's that they're strong it's that that they can withstand the forces that the city puts upon them and the circumstances that they come from and they can sustain their growth and they could they can persist so with that notion and with that knowledge of what an isosceles triangle means from a strength perception we we've developed this Student Success triangle and the idea is this you're not going to be successful unless you're academically challenged but you're also not going to be successful with the best academic curriculum if you're not sound in the areas of motivation social engagement and self-management and the idea is that that through this completely different approach that the kids are being exposed to in our school they're actually creating this schema that makes them more whole in these areas and I'm just going to talk a little bit about each one now motivation imagine for a second and some of you this may work for a book for me and I it wouldn't imagine for one second that you were told in a month you were gonna be playing basketball against LeBron James one-on-one but don't worry cuz you're gonna get the best coach in the world for that month to prepare and then in a month you're gonna go on the court and play with LeBron well I don't care if you gave me a month or the next ten years that's really not going to go very well for me now imagine the same situation with with school we tell kids it's okay that you haven't been successful before we're gonna work really hard in a month we're gonna assess you at the end of that month and you're gonna be fine I think you can understand what I'm saying you know that idea that we're gonna close these gaps in that short of a time with everybody doesn't leave a lot of room for motivation and what what was clear as we interviewed our graduates was that the motivation that they felt and the encouragement that they were receiving was a direct result of one of the key components of our school model which was was mastery and simple put mastery takes this set of important learning outcomes and says we're gonna we're gonna make sure that you know these at a high level and then we're going to provide the time and resources necessary to make sure that you get there in the traditional environment time is the constant and what you know is the variable but in our in our construct what you know is the constant and the time you need is the variable and because of the model that I've been so fortunate to be a part of and because of the support from the community we're able to individualize the attention that kids get and give them the time to reach these key skills the second major component is social engagement I mean typically when you think about social engagement in a school environment we're talking about prom extracurricular activities the ways kids relate to other kids in the school and those are really important things but the interesting part about it is is think about it for a second and when I was blessed with a very strong family myself and think about for a second who is it that you're gonna call when you're struggling in college who is it that you're gonna rely on if you don't have the experiences to deal with the situation that that you're faced with if you're a first-generation college student there isn't somebody that's gone through that experience in your immediate family you know that's no disrespect to you or to to your family it's just the truth and what we found when we talk to our kids that were graduating was that they had actually taken this notion of social engagement from the point of engaging with my peers in supporting each other which was a big part but they also had been benefiting from the relationships that they had with the adults in the environment this is Hakeem here in the foreground Hakeem is an engineer at GE and Hakeem has a lunch body every year eats lunch and soda so does every other student in our 10th grade they launch with a GE volunteer twice a month and there's a small little speed-dating event at the front end to match the mentors up and then and then the student engages with this person twice a month the whole time they're in tenth grade that's powerful that's powerful for me that's also very powerful for people who don't necessarily have the experiences in their home situations to have people around them that have the answers that have gone to school for engineering that understand how to make it through these situations and our kids talk about networks that they've developed and and talked about the X the executive from Key Bank who the student can pick up the phone and call when they have a question about something and and that matters I think you follow me now with this triangle thing so you have to be motivated and you have to be properly engaged okay the third component of the triangle is self-management I can be properly prepared to take on this task I can have the right people around me if I lose control of myself or if I participate in in destructive behaviors that compromised my ability to get to the end then I'm not going to be successful and unfortunately too many times when kids enter mc-squared some high school they've been conditioned to respond negatively to situations this situation here that you're reading now is the opposite of that and this is the situation that that we're most proud of students getting recognized in college for for the work that they've done in college means that there's been some carryover from what was happening in the high school you know and in as a lottery school there's a wide range of kids that enter not every student has the same drastic needs as the others but some of the kids that come into our school situation have have experienced some of the most deplorable situations imaginable and and have not been taught the right way to manage those situations so so there's this process we run ringing Pavlov's Bell okay kids come in in ninth grade it's a very scary time ninth-grade you you don't want people to know you don't know what's going on ninth-grade you're you're stepping into this new world everyone's told you how big high school is going to be and how different it is and how you have to step up well in stepping up means something different for a lot of people so so something's happening in our school and I believe strongly that it's this connection that the whole community has to the school that's creating this this situation where the Bell is actually on ringing and when they're graduating they're conditioned to respond to situations in a different way I'm gonna leave you with a story today and it's not the story of a student going to an Ivy League school which we've had two students so far go to Ivy League schools it's not the story of someone winning the national competition or getting published for some of the work that the student did but it's a story of a student named James and as a principal he pretty much can make a list of what you're going to do that day and then once the day starts you're kind of at the mercy of of the day and and this July at GE was no different and I was standing outside it was a nice warm day and I was standing outside waiting as the kids were coming into school and gee they come in advance and get dropped off out front and come in this day the van that James was in didn't even stop in James was out the front door and sprinting to the school my first thought was who's chasing him and what did he do which of you knew James at all wouldn't be too far out of the realm of possibilities because his triangle was really not aligned very well when he came to us but but this moment it was something different and James was running up to me and I could tell when he got close that he wasn't scared because I'd see him scared before to what was going on was James had been sitting in church the day before and he'd been watching this curtain flap on the wall and he said you know what there's a laser cutter in the Fab Lab at GE I can go in to that laser cutter and I can make something that stops that curtain from flapping you know I let them in to the Fab Lab and I told us teachers would be late to class and then the day just kept going I realized if we can get James we can get pretty much anyone thank you