People always call this school innovative, but I resist the word. I like to say that MNCS is sensible. It’s a truly straightforward way of going at education. Here you learn process, not regurgitation. You learn basic facts here, too, but also how to learn, the process of learning. This place gets you to the point where you know what to do next without someone having to tell you what to do. You leave here with so many incredible life skills.

It also gives you a safe place to fail. If you fail in college, it costs money and is on your college record. If you don’t go to college and don’t have the life and motivation skills on your job, you’re fired and that’s on your record. Here, if you fail, the worst thing that happens is that you don’t graduate on time.

Success here is trial and error. You might try one project and it doesn’t work. You do another, and it does work. It’s like life. You learn from your mistakes. But here, you do it with a safety net. You learn things that you’ll use 20 years later.

Before coming to MNCS, I thought of going into teaching. Now I know I will. I feel I’ve learned so much about teaching and learning. I feel I’m ahead of almost every undergrad who’s thinking of going into teaching. I’ve experienced so much here, thought so hard, feel so committed to teaching. I’ve built this commitment through my work at MNCS. I guess you’d say I’m a student of teaching and learning.

On reform at MNCS

My senior project is around education reform, working with the EdVisions cooperative. [Tim describes an EdVisions conference he recently attended in St. Paul for charter schools that are part of the EdVisions network. Click to see Tim’s project reading list, plus his journal from the conference.]

I started off focusing on issues involving the MNCS staff. The school has new staff who weren’t part of planning and building the school, so they don’t know what it really took or takes to make the school work. Some days it seems one-third of the staff are doing two-thirds of the work. And all the staff feel pressed.

So I’ve been talking with staff, knowing how stretched they are, to help them see where they most need to put their efforts with students. They need to ask, “will this help the students?” If so, then they should keep doing it. If it hurts or hinders students, then they need to stop doing it.

But the burden can’t fall just on staff. I’ve started pushing to get student involvement, too.

Take tutoring. A lot of staff spend a good deal of their time on remediation and tutoring with new students. This is something students like me could help with. We could be tutors. If staff could pass some of the tutoring load to the more proficient students, then they would have more time to advise and work with other students who need other kinds of help.

Or take mentoring. A lot of kids here, when they don’t understand how to do something, they don’t ask for help and then don’t get the work done. I’m a big advocate of students mentoring other students. They are in an excellent position to provide this help.

At MNCS, change takes work, but it’s possible. You’re not up against a brick wall like in other schools. If we can make it that staff and students both want something to happen, then it will. But now, there isn’t really a good avenue for doing so. That’s one of the reasons I’ve started to develop a student action group at MNCS. Do you want me to read you my mock mission statement? [Tim reads from a document on his computer screen.]

On credits and profiles of learning

When it comes to awarding students project credits at MNCS, I think we need to do some restructuring. It can feel awfully arbitrary. Some students seem to get more credit than others, even when they did the same thing. And it’s frustrating when you see another student get the same amount of credit when they didn’t do the same thing.

And then there’s the issue of time spent versus amount learned. They’re not the same thing. But the current system leans toward the first. This is especially the case with a group project, where one student may have put in more hours but learned less.

But it’s true elsewhere, too. I could read in 20 hours a book it would take another student two weeks to learn--and then get only half as much credit as he does. I sometimes feel I get docked for being advanced--for learning as much or more in less time. MNCS should be a place where advanced students are not penalized for being advanced.

As to the state’s Profiles of Learning, we seem to pay most attention to them at MNCS when we start and finish projects. But to me the critical point to think about how a project lines up with the profiles of learning is mid-stream. It’s when you already have done some work on a project that you can see how much it is hitting one of the profiles and how the project might be adjusted (while you are still only halfway done) to make it hit the profile better or other profiles, too.

I f you ask me, I think the Profiles of Learning should count more than credits, that it’s finishing the profiles and not accumulating credits that matters. This makes sense: when you have your profiles done, you should be able to graduate.

On time logs and project proposals

MNCS’s Time and Learning Log asks students two questions: What did I learn today? and What is the next step to complete this project? In several instances, Tim has modified the original log to better reflect his learning on a particular project. For his work as a math tutor, for instance, Tim changed the log questions to: Who did I help today? and What did I teach/explain? Similarly, for last year’s Learning Levels project, Tim created two separate logs--one for his discussions and one for his written work--that recognize the importance of his spending time talking with students and staff to solicit their support for the new learning level system.

Various studies say that when students log their time and document what they have done, they learn more. I believe this, too. But when it reaches the point where time logs are just pro forma, or people create dishonest time logs, then what’s the value? The reason I created my own time logs for some of my projects, making them more suitable to what I was doing, was because I believed time logs are and should be valuable.

I feel the same way about the [MNCS] project proposal form. It’s not the be-and-end-all, but a tool for formalizing what a student does. So when it comes to group projects or staff-led classes, I’ve felt a need to create a proposal form more suited to the work.

On learning levels

Last year Tim participated on the committee tackling the issue of learning levels, a system that ties student expectations and responsibilities to privileges and freedoms. The group used MNCS’s performance rubric as a starting place, then generated a variety of matrices or rubrics for creating a new framework. Each version--about five iterations in all--became shorter but less detailed.

In my view, the versions of the learning levels we created last spring were much better than what’s currently in use; the rubrics were very specific about what each level contained. What we have now lacks that detail. And without real specificity around what each level means, the process feels arbitrary. Without common definitions, it’s hard to have consensus and uniformity. And then rather than being a tool that cements the school’s expectations and culture, the idea of learning levels becomes a wedge driving students and teachers apart.

Another thing I don’t like about the current iteration is that it makes the privileges and freedoms seem more important than the requirements. It should be the other way around.

And we need to look at how we can use learning levels in stronger ways. Students aren’t getting this. There are some students who come to MNCS after failing everywhere else and don’t have much commitment or willingness to help the school succeed. They are just here because they have to be. And then there are student like me who put their heart into this school. [Click here for excerpts from Tim’s essay requesting placement in Learning Level 3.]

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