programs : ithaka project

For the past two years, the Brookline High community—staff, students, and parents—engaged in a conversation guided by Jim Collins’ best selling organizational management text, Good to Great.  To focus our school improvement efforts, we established academic and social “Parameters of Greatness” that reflect the deepest beliefs of this high school community about the education of our young men and women. The most compelling academic parameters for our school include:
• all students take ownership of their learning;
• all students find, develop, and express strong interests and passions; and
• all students achieve success after high school and maintain a commitment to life-long learning.
The most compelling social parameters include:
• all students establish a meaningful relationship with at least one adult in the school;
• all students contribute to their community through responsible citizenship and service; and relationships in our school reflect our diversity.

We then established metrics for each of the parameters so that we could measure how well our students were doing.  Finally, we created “programs” that would allow us to achieve the goals of the Parameters of Greatness.

For the 2008 – 2009 school year, we are launching two such programs:  Freshman Advisory and Senior Projects.  We call the project “Ithaka” because, like Odysseus’ challenging journey back to Ithaka, it is all about the challenging intellectual and social journey that all students take in high school.

The Freshman Advisory, in conjunction with the Freshman Tutorial Program and under the stewardship of the freshman dean and her team of counselors, will help provide a “soft landing” for the 9th graders.  Advisory will create small communities—12 students per teacher; 24 students in a group with two teachers—for a demographically diverse cross-section of the BHS student population.  Advisories will meet each week—sometimes in their small groups and sometimes in freshman-class assemblies—during T-Block on Tuesdays.  A curriculum, developed by BHS staff, will drive the group meetings.  The curriculum includes major units such as:
• “Teaching the Culture of BHS, through the Mantras”: The BHS mantras are “Freedom and Responsibility; Liberty and Duty; That’s the Deal,” “Hard Work Over Time,” and, “We Bring Our Best Selves to School Each Day; You Bring Your Best Self to School Each Day”;
• “Adventure Experiences,” for which groups periodically plan and take a field trip that may be physically and/or intellectually challenging or may be a community service project; and
• “Tell Your Story,” a structured activity during which students write and talk about their lives, cultures and traditions. This is an intentional strategy that will allow all of us to learn—up close and personal—about the richness of our diversity.

This curriculum, in conjunction with Freshman Assemblies, allows our school to achieve great unity in the midst of tremendous diversity.

The Senior Project is an alternative to the Senior Paper.  This program will allow students, mentored by faculty members, to demonstrate their strong interests and passions in an academically rigorous “Exhibition of Learning.”  For the first year, this program will be a pilot for 40 students, with a team that includes teachers from the Social Studies, Performing Arts, and English departments.  Each student will take a senior English course of his/her choosing in conjunction with either the Social Studies or the Performing Arts Project Seminar.  Senior projects will be reviewed and judged by a panel of teachers and members of the Brookline community.

Senior Projects provide culminating academic experiences for students.  Brookline High Senior Project Seminars create a community of students who are “clustered” and work with a team of teachers during their senior year.  As schools struggle with “senioritis,” the BHS Senior Project Seminars, like the English Department’s Senior Paper, offer an antidote—students working with teachers on projects that reflect their engagement in the academic world.

Both programs—Freshman Advisory and Senior Projects—emerge from concerns in the school community that not all students connect with an adult during their high school years, that there is not enough student ownership of learning at our school, and too few opportunities for some students to develop and express their strong interests and passions.  This project is about better fulfilling our mission of reaching all students during their high school years.  The impetus for Ithaka comes from faculty expression for the need to do better with more students, and student and parent focus groups that expressed strong support for the Parameters of Greatness and the action plans that emerged from these conversations.  While most Brookline High students express strong satisfaction with their relationships at school and opportunities to develop their interests and passions, some do not.  Public high schools are about all students, not some students.  The Ithaka Projects ensure that all students have access to the resources Brookline High has to offer.