Design Challenges from the Hack 12-13 Group

Arts and Media Prep 
AMP is a progressive high school. Our leaders see that the traditional high school model does not work in NYC, and are dedicated to helping our students succeed. However, there are some aspects of our progressive methods that are not successful. One example of this is having heterogeneous classes. Many students come to our school well below grade level, and it is hard to teach basic skills (i.e. reading) in a heterogeneous setting, while challenging high-performing students. Another example is the grading system. The administration does not like grades, but since we need them for student transcripts, the result is a grading system that is confusing. A third example is that we are trying to do some terrific things, but do not have many resources; we are a small school that is lacking a good arts program, even though “Arts” is in our name, and we would like to have a strong internship program, but do not have enough support. We have lofty goals, and a very hard-working staff, but our problem is that some of our non-traditional methods are not doing enough to solve the problems of a  “traditional” NYC school.

Math Department New Design High School
There are multiple challenges facing the Math Department at New Design High School. The first challenge is the discrepancy of skills of entering students. Students often lack the fundamental skills needed to be successful math students in high school. Those lacking skills include strong math basics, the ability to problem solve and the inability to contextually think about math. Middle school math, and for that matter, elementary school math, does not set-up students for success in high school and college. A dominance of test prep, a culture of completing worksheets without being challenged to think deeply math and poor instruction contribute to a culture of negativity regarding math. The end result is that students often feel discouraged, unmotivated and apathetic about math instruction. The second challenge is the widening of the performance skills gap while students are at New Design.  Instead of the performance gap decreasing between high achieving and low achieving students, the gap widens for students while enrolled at New Design.  Challenges facing the department right now include:

• New Design students are in constant need have their fundamentals reinforced while learning new content. 
• The New Design curriculum is not yet aligned, vertically and/or horizontally. 
•  Differentiation with students at different levels is especially challenging.  
• There is a lack of agreement between math department members on what they value and what should be integrated into the curriculum.  Members have different approaches and philosophies toward teaching math and the disconnection between the grade level curriculums is a direct representation of the lack of common agreement among department members.   

Bronx Compass High School Challenge

One of the key goals of Bronx Compass High School is to marry essential standards based content, skills, and a classical high school education with intensive personalization in the form of internships, interest based modules, and personalized opportunities. The problem is that, as the school grows, we are unsure of how to organize, track, and support these two competing ideologies. The key difficulty to solving this issue is deciding what is important to the classical model and the personalized model and how these two meet.

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New Design Math Department

CCSS Chairs in Hall (High School) from Math Department on Vimeo.

There are multiple challenges facing the Math Department at New Design High School. The first challenge is the discrepancy of skills of entering students. Students often lack the fundamental skills needed to be successful math students in high school. Those lacking skills include strong math basics, the ability to problem solve and the inability to contextually think about math. Middle school math, and for that matter, elementary school math, does not set-up students for success in high school and college. A dominance of test prep, a culture of completing worksheets without being challenged to think deeply math and poor instruction contribute to a culture of negativity regarding math. The end result is that students often feel discouraged, unmotivated and apathetic about math instruction. The second challenge is the widening of the performance skills gap while students are at New Design.  Instead of the performance gap decreasing between high achieving and low achieving students, the gap widens for students while enrolled at New Design.  Challenges facing the department right now include: 

• New Design students are in constant need have their fundamentals reinforced while learning new content. 
• The New Design curriculum is not yet aligned, vertically and/or horizontally. 
•  Differentiation with students at different levels is especially challenging.  
• There is a lack of agreement between math department members on what they value and what should be integrated into the curriculum.  Members have different approaches and philosophies toward teaching math and the disconnection between the grade level curriculums is a direct representation of the lack of common agreement among department members.   

Design Challenge:  How do we teach math to develop youth in cognitive and non-cognitive areas that can ensure their happiness and success in life? 

Exploratory Stage:

•  Illustrative Mathematics
• GAIM
•  The Work of Dylan Williams:   
• Six Secrets of a Happy Classroom
• Innovate NYC Math Challenge Video 
• Kipp Middle Schools:  Impacts on Achievement
• Crossing the River with Dogs Book  
• Vertical Math Progressions from the  University of Arizona
• Common Core Standards
• Partnership for Assessment of Readiness and College and Career Readiness
• Mathematics Common Core Toolbox
• Power Point Common Core
• Mathematics Assessment Project:  Assessing 21st Century Math
• Ted Talk:  Dan Meyer Math Curriculum
• Interview with NYU Professor Mark Saul
• Mr. Meyer's Blog
• Mark Driscoll and his books
• National Research Council's Ten Research Findings from Adding It Up 
• Dana Center at the University of Texas at Austin Academic Youth Development Initiative Summer Bridge Program
• Impact Analysis: Youth Development and Student Learning in Math and Science 
• MitC and the work of Cathy Fosnot
• Deborah Ballat
• Barbara Debitsky at Bank Street
• New York Times article on Blue Engine

Phil Daro - Against "Answer-Getting" from SERP Institute on Vimeo.

Math Department Members Summary Paragraphs 

Karissa Gonzales (Student Teacher)

I agree that students at New Design are in need of having their foundational skills strengthened in order to succeed in Math.  New Design needs a new way of teaching that focuses on real life problem solving and connections, constant communication/feedback between teacher and student, Peer group learning and personalization in learning in order to motivate and support our students in learning mathematics.  I do believe that students learning should be paced to a certain extent depending on feedback from students but I do not agree that students do not need deadlines as deadlines are part of the real world and this is what we are preparing our students at New Design for.

Pei Jun Qu (Student Teacher)

I agree that students may enjoy math learning if it is presented at their level or related to them. As much as I love math, if students are not going to pursue a college path or career in the math and science fields, when are they ever going to need to graph a sine or cosine curve? It is possible to incorporate math into the students’ daily life, i.e. creating a budget or understanding bank rates. I think New Design’s Model Math class creates this opportunity. We should be incorporating personal skills that will be beneficial for students when they are out of high school. Though these “artificial deadlines” are a challenge to students, we should impose the importance of deadlines because in the real world missing a deadline means fees and ruining credit reports.

Cheryl (12th Grade Math Teacher)

Students should be successful first and then challenged in math.  Find a way to accomplish that we might not lose so many of our students "buy in" in math.  Change our students feelings about math, they will be independently motivated to succeed in math.  To do that we focus on problem-solving in the classroom.  Promote open-ended problem-solving.  In the math classrooms here at NDHS students should move onto new content and new challenges at a personalized rate.

Asia(9th and 10th Grade Math Teacher)

Math teachers at NDHS, at an optimal level, will experience difficulty supporting students in their cognitive and non-cognitive development due to the pressures of the ambiguous Common Core standards and state's required standardized testing that dictates whether students are ready to advance to the next level in their NDHS career.  Goal 1 and 2 of the math department definitely reflect that the non-cognitive student development component that ND desires to be priority is not at the moment on the top of our "things-to-do" list.  The fact is that we need students to pass regents exams and work on non-cognitive development. The decision on which of these items hold more weight depends on who is reading the data and how it is being interpreted. With that being said, I ask where and what is the focus of the department, individual teachers, and school administration?

Julius (9th and 10th Grade Math Teacher)

There is a need for a goal setting process that involves a feedback loop.  Specifically, we need to develop and get good at using learning goals that are based in the common core, use a backwards design process (e.g., UbD), and provide the opportunity for feedback to move students forward.  Once we have well defined goal posts and can articulate them - both for ourselves and in a way that students are able to internalize - we can endeavor to provide feedback to students that is useful.

Dr. Phil (Founder and Math Teacher)
In addition to ensuring that our entering students do not lack the basic skills required to engage meaningfully in HS mathematics, NDHS needs to refocus our efforts away from standardized testing and back to problem solving and group work. By empowering our students to become good problem solvers they will naturally do better on tests.  Explicit instruction in problem solving has been shown to not only increase students ability to solve problems but also their ability to achieve procedural fluency with various procedures as well as increase their ability to solve multi-step problems (some interesting research has been done on this specifically in the context of algebra by Jon Star at harvard).  Focusing on group work in the classroom will help us in a nunber of ways. Research suggests that groups are more effective at solving problems than individuals, and that when members of the group have to solve subsequent problems without the group, they perform better than those without the group experience (Barron 2000). Group-work also enables a more student-centered classroom, gets students doing more math and facilitates differentiation within the classroom.

Latest Hack Theoretical Framework

IDEO Design Process

As we have meet this year we will continue to refine the Beehive Hack Process.

Define the Challenge and Problem Stage

• Brainstorm the issue, problems and challenges that will be addressed in the design process. Take the brainstorm and write a short design challenge paragraph.  
• Use protocols with a peer group to refine the challenge paragraph.    
• Evolve the paragraph into a one sentence design challenge.  

Discovery Stage

• Sketch a timeline of project including all important dates.  
• Gather Data from multiple perspectives including research, observation and investigation.  
• Design challenge/problem is revisited and understood in greater depth using interpretations from observations notes.   

Interpretation Stage

• Share stories and insights from observations as they begin to search for meaning from observation notes.  
• Find meaning and patterns in the stories and insights who are an interesting cross section of the involved populations, 
• Design methods to frame opportunities and brainstorm possible solutions with a focus on divergent and convergent insights. 
• Create visual representations of team's design insights.  

Ideation and Experimentation 

• Brainstorms are discussed, narrowed and integrated into the ideation process.   
• Quick prototypes are designed to visualize possible solutions.  
• Prototypes are examined for desirability, viability and feasibility.  Importantly, all school change is dependent on the school culture, resources and constituent buy in.  The most important question for assessment of the prototype:  Is this solution a keystone habit than can create transformative change?  
• Once an idea is selected it is important to understand, explore and develop the idea through playing with the idea. Visit another classroom or school.  Interview students, parents and teachers.  Discuss with peers and discuss with an school expert and/or discuss with an expert from a completely different field to get feedback on prototype.  From the feedback identify needs.  

Piloting

• Implement idea in a pilot stage.  
• Collect information from pilot to improve idea.
• Create a hack that tells the story of the design process for a larger audience that can give you feedback on the process.   
• Revise the idea to improve the idea.  

Abilene Paradox and False Agreements

An Abilene Paradox from Richard Boyle on Vimeo.

Many years ago Professor Jerry B. Harvey discovered that the fundamental problem of contemporary organizations is the inability to cope with agreement--not conflict. He finds that most agreement in organizations is actually false consensus. It occurs because many people feel they might be isolated, censured or ridiculed if they voice objections. This often leads groups to act on inappropriate goals and is a setup for organizational failure.  Harvey also believes that organizations stay away from conflict and keep ways of being that is not core to their beliefs and mission/vision.  These series of false agreements compromise the livelihood of many organizations.  

Core Challenge iZone360

Here is the challenge from Megan Roberts and her iZone360:

One of our challenges is to situate our reform initiative into the larger department of education. We strive to create support structures (money, people and advocacy) that allow individual schools to expedite a change process whose results will increase success for students. Our goal is for the new and innovative strategies that emerge from these schools can be diffused to other schools throughout the city. That said, the challenge is that changing school structures, even when expedited, can take years. Additionally, we struggle to maintain support for schools while also having clear expectations as well as measurable outcomes that show that our initiative is making a difference in the lives kids in the short term.  

Alcoa and the Afternoon Cookie Habit

Charles Dugigg talks about his cookie habit.

In Chapter 4 of his book Power of Habit, Charles Dugigg shares the story of Paul O'Neill and his leadership at Alcoa Aluminum.  O'Neill, the former United States Secretary of the Treasure under George W Bush, shocked investors and employees when in his acceptance speech at the yearly he said:

I want to talk to you about worker safety. Every year, numerous Alcoa workers are injured so badly that they miss a day of work. I intend to make Alcoa the safest company in America. I intend to go for zero injuries.

Investors called their clients and advised them to sell their stock immediately.  Alcoa was already doing poorly and some were talking of the end of the business.  The new CEO needed to save the company.  However, instead of focusing on profits O'Neill was introducing what he thought would be a keystone habit.  Dugigg writes:

O’Neill believed that some habits have the power to start a chain reaction, changing other habits as they move through an organization. Some habits, in other words, matter more than others in remaking businesses and lives. These are “keystone habits,” and they can influence how people work, eat, play, live, spend, and communicate. Keystone habits start a process that, over time, transforms everything.

As the company focused on safety, employees and investors were amazed at the other areas of change, as well. Alcoa eventually rose to new heights in production, employee satisfaction, and in their portfolios, as well.

The Power of Habit is an excellent book.  There are two ways we can apply it to the work we are doing.  

1.  Much of what principals, teachers and students do is based on their habits.  If you cannot change a habit then you can change their approach or performance.

2.  Transformational change, especially in touch situations, must focus on these keystone habits.  

See how to change a habit below: