Heading into the month of February we enter a period each year where we are both continuing the work of the current school year and at the same time preparing for the school year to come. The clearest sign of this transition is the series of prospective family information sessions and the start of interviews for new teachers and staff that begin this month. New families and teachers seek out ANCS for a variety of reasons, and in the process, I find it is helpful to be clear about the mission and practices of our school so that those who are interested in our school—be it for their child or for themselves—do not wind up wondering why we do things a particular way after they are already here. Knowing what ANCS is (and what it is not) is important to be aware of on the front-end. So let me try to capture a few key points on the subject here.
ANCS is guided by a set of principles—drawn from the Coalition of Essential Schools—that help shape the experience for students, teachers, and parents. A couple of ideas embedded in these principles—“helping students learn to use their minds well” and “less is more”—sound appealing to many on paper, but when truly practiced, can sometimes raise questions for parents of new students. Supporting students in developing critical thinking abilities and channeling our resources towards that goal means that the curriculum focuses on fewer domains but delves into them more deeply to afford students time to explore, analyze, and debate. Conversely, what this also means is that we do not place as much emphasis on gearing students up for multiple choice tests that favor remembering lots of facts or offering students choice among lots of different elective classes as they get older. One example of this can be found in how we approach the arrangement of our foreign language program. As public school funding begins to rebound, our school is committed to returning the staffing of our Spanish program (yes, just Spanish—less is more, remember?) to pre-recession levels. But rather than spreading teachers thinly across all grade levels simply to expose students to Spanish, we will be concentrating our efforts on providing students with more intensive second language learning in the upper grades to achieve our goal of helping students to gain foundational fluency.
New parents and teachers also sometimes ask about our school’s “rigor” and “structure” for students. These questions often surface because some schools’ interpretation of those words is not evident at ANCS. Students do not wear uniforms or walk along taped lines in the hallway. We do not have a formal gifted program and students typically do not bring home hours of homework each night. But don’t be fooled—we aim to hold students to high standards, to challenge them, and to create a focused environment in which they can do their best learning. We just go about it differently.
At ANCS, rigor is found not in a big pile of worksheets but in asking students to engage in projects that call upon them to apply skills and use knowledge in more authentic ways. Answering questions at the end of a chapter from a science textbook is one approach to learning about Newton’s laws. Another would be to have students design, test, and redesign model rocket racers using the principles of Newton’s laws and explain their process as our 8th graders do. Or, similarly, our elementary grade students setting up different systems of government to understand their benefits and drawbacks rather than only reading about the differences between them. We place multiple teachers in most classrooms to help coach students of varying ability levels through these experiences, seeing the benefit of having them work together and being able to shift students around rather than placing them in rigidly tracked classes. We also assess students on more than just their performance on the end of year state tests because in order to challenge them we must recognize that what’s important for students to know and be able to do cannot all be measured by a multiple choice test. To help students grow intellectually, physically, and social-emotionally, we have to ask them to show their performance on real tasks—in writing and in math, but also in the arts and physical fitness.
The structure and routines at ANCS are less about getting students to comply with rules and expectations because an adult asked them to do so than they are about helping students to want to live up those expectations and to develop the ability to do so. There are no taped lines in the hallways, but there are teachers and students greeting each other as they come into the classroom. There is time given to pausing, breathing, and practicing being mindful and in control of emotions. There is constant reflection among students on their actions and their impact. This approach can be slower and messier than having, say, a system where students earn demerits for misbehavior (or one in which students earn tickets for prizes for good behavior). But we feel—and have seen—that students ultimately gain stronger, more lasting self-regulation skills by emphasizing clear guiding principles coupled with firm supports rather than leaning on lots of carrots or sticks.
Another critical understanding any new family or teacher should have in choosing ANCS is that collaboration is at the center of all we do. Students often work together in groups to complete projects. Teachers develop and plan curricular units together across classrooms. And, as the CES principles state, parents should be “key collaborators and vital members of the school community”. At ANCS, this takes the form of collaboration between parent and teacher about what’s best for an individual student as well as having parent and teacher feedback be central to the decision-making process for big issues.
As a charter school, ANCS is a school of choice, and prospective families and teachers should be informed about our school before choosing it. This isn’t to say our school shuns new or different ideas or remains the same today as it was when it first opened 13 years ago. Quite the contrary. We constantly push ourselves to improve in our work with students and that striving has led to changes through the years. Through it all, though, we continue to remain grounded in core principles that should align with what you want from a school should you choose to join us.