by Joanna Klonsky
NORTH BERWICK, ME—Teenagers spend a lot of time thinking, talking and dreaming about life after high school. Through the Beyond Graduation Project, Noble High School teacher Kate Gardoqui has turned her Advanced Placement English course into an incubator for intensive study on the topic.
Located in North Berwick, Maine, Noble High School has an enrollment of just over 1,000 students, and is divided into small learning communities. “We do all these experimental things, like heterogeneous grouping and pods,” says Emma Hanzl, 16. “It makes it sound like a huge experiment, but its not really. Its like any other high school.”
Through the Beyond Graduation Project, students investigate one central question: “How does our school prepare our kids for the challenges they’re going to face beyond graduation?” As part of the curriculum, each AP English student, about 40 students each year, selects a Noble alumna to interview and profile in writing.
“The students do some traditional research looking at the philosophy of our school and high school pedagogy in general, and then they go out in the community and find graduates or dropouts from our high school, and they interview them about their lives,” says Gardoqui.
Interviews and Profiles
Sean Ashburn, 17, wrote about what it means to be a valedictorian at Noble. “I interviewed the guidance counselor, the principal and two former valedictorians,” says Ashburn, a rising senior.
Some Beyond Graduation researchers profiled graduates who had children while in high school. Others focused on people who dropped out of school.
“I interviewed a former foreign correspondent, a journalist who went to Noble. Now he’s a filmmaker,” says Hanzl.
Ashburn says he learned a lot about investigative journalism through his interviews. “People had the chance to find really unique people that they hadn’t met,” he says.
Coming to Conclusions
At the end of the project, says Mike Buccieri, a rising senior at Noble, “we read everyone’s paper, and took all the information from all the people that had graduated. We synthesized all that and came to conclusions about what Noble High School is really about, and what its like after high school—what things were good and bad.”
After studying the results, Gardoqui’s students compiled a letter to the Noble faculty administration with six major policy recommendations that they believed would help Noble students succeed after graduation, including the creation of an advisory program.
Students also requested the opportunity to speak with faculty during teacher workshop days in the fall. “We would share with the teachers, talking about student and teacher motivation,” says Ashburn. “A lot of the kids in my English class are really big activists in our school, and so, definitely, this is a project that’s going somewhere. It’s not stopping at the end of the year.”
Beyond Teaching to the Test
Gardoqui knows she has diverged from the norm by making this research project the focus of her AP course. But instead of drilling for the impending AP exam, Gardoqui wanted to create “a service learning project, but one that is demanding that kids use the skills that require a high level of English.” Besides, she says, the project effectively prepares students for the exam. “I present this whole thing as like a huge synthesis project. So we do practice essays of that sort. We’re definitely working on the skills.”
Hanzl feels the project was worthwhile, and believes it may have had a lasting impact on the school. “It was really neat to get the students’ perspective,” she says. “The administration is always looking down, but it was really neat to see, ‘hey, we’re actually living their policies that they make.’ It was neat to show them what’s working and what’s not working.”
Teddy Hoffman, 17, one of Gardoqui’s students, agrees. “It’s nice to be able to do something different. This is something that affects us—who we are in the future and who we are now.”
Excerpts from the Beyond Graduation Project
“Noble is organized into 4 different academies or teams and when asked how it’s set up, many students reply and explain, ‘It’s like Hogwarts.’ All the students are grouped onto one of the four academies and stay with their team for all four years of high school. Each academy is assigned a section, or ‘pod,’ within the building where all of the classes for that team are located. These pods have classrooms and an area where students can study or just hang out with friends. … As I ask Katie how she feels about the heterogeneous communities she answers it as if she has memorized what she is going to say. ‘Being grouped with all levels of….I don’t wanna say intelligence… but thinking helped to create a real-life scenario.’
“She says, ‘being in college, with people from all over the nation and the world, you see a mixture of people with different education styles. Being grouped heterogeneously helped me understand people from all different types of backgrounds. The school should keep the heterogeneous community.’ Now as her first year in college is dying down she is slowly aiming for a bachelor’s degree in International Business….”
“Obviously attending Noble High School was an enjoyable experience for Cyndle, who graduated in 2003, because she is now working at the school as a yearbook advisor and substitute teacher. However, Cyndle’s high school experience wasn’t a typical one. In her words, ‘The teachers that I enjoyed most were the- and this may sound selfish, but- were the people that really let me be who I was. Let me be able to explore things maybe differently than the rest of the class was just so that it was a challenge and learning experience that worked for me.’ The same would apply to her students if she were to become a teacher, one of the many career paths that she has considered…”
--The Road Less Traveled, Maryanne Nicolo
“F in Spanish, refused to be on the school paper, member of Poetry Excel, and wanted to be ‘a writer, not a Journalist.’” This was Guy Taylor in high school; he believed that ‘the only true works are those which are done creatively.’ He attended Clark University where he received a Bachelor of Arts in American Literature. He still disapproved of Journalism and only wrote for the college paper during his last two years to get a few by-lines under his belt. From here he began writing freelance for the Northwest Current, a print-only Washington D.C. area newspaper. He continued freelancing and after some time received an entry-level position at the Washington Times. Five years later he was a foreign correspondent traveling all over the world for stories. He has visited Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Guantanamo Bay, the United Kingdom, and South America; twenty-five countries in all. During this time in his life he would always have a suitcase packed, ready to leave at a moments notice for any destination and for any length of time. This was exciting, but the need to tell stories rather than simply report continued to press on his mind. Soon, he began to do less work with the Times and more freelance… He may be a bit sleep deprived (he now takes naps with [his] baby) but this Filmmaker, Journalist, and NOBLE Graduate has made something of his life. He now tells high school students everywhere that ‘your career should be about you, you need to make it happen, and you need to be willing to pursue something you love and believe in, not profit and big checks.’ That is what he did, and so far it seems to be working.”
--Unpacked…, Emma Hanzl
