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May 23, 2009

'Mini academy' set for fall at Career Academy

By Rachel Brown'

A “school” within the Whitfield Career Academy will open this fall for incoming freshmen and will be modeled after a California charter school with a 100 percent graduation rate.

The 125 ninth-graders entering the Career Academy this fall will be issued take-home laptops — the cost hasn’t been determined, but the money will come from the school’s technology budget, officials said — to go along with a rejuvenated focus on modern technology and job skills in what educators are calling the 21st Century Learning Academy.

Lessons will involve ways for students to interact with members of the communities through public displays of their work, and learning will take place through hands-on experience and research, not just from textbooks and lectures. The students will also have a digital portfolio of work by graduation.

“We really saw a gap in what kids are learning in school and the skills that they need to be effective citizens and leaders in the 21st century,” said Eric White, a social studies teacher at the Career Academy who has been working for months on the new curriculum and teaching philosophy. “If we don’t do this, we’re not acting morally.”

White and 45 other Whitfield educators visited San Diego’s High Tech High in April at a cost of $850 a person to glean ideas. The money came from the school system’s $888,807 staff development budget. High Tech High has received national acclaim for its high graduation rate and teaching methods.

This fall, six teachers at the Career Academy will be devoted to the mini academy for each of six subject areas: math, science, social studies, language arts, English as a second language and special education. Classes will be less rigid and include lessons from multiple subject areas, officials say.

“We really want everything to connect for them,” White said. “We don’t want to teach in a vacuum.”

North Whitfield Middle School eighth-grader Zenaida Torres said she applied to the Career Academy because she’d heard good things about the school offering real-world connections and about graduates being able to get in college. She hopes to establish her own real estate and bakery businesses after school.

This fall’s ninth-graders will also be the first group of freshmen who won’t be able to enroll immediately in one of the career pathways. Instead, they’ll spend their first two years working on core academic credits and being exposed through classroom visits to each of the different pathways the school offers like culinary arts, cosmetology and engineering.

Principal Phillip Brown said current students won’t see a change. The freshmen were selected through a blind lottery, and each middle school was allotted a number of students based on its student population.



Changes across the system

Superintendent Katie Brochu said the five middle schools will implement the same teaching-learning approach for sixth-graders. She met with a group of about 50 educators at the Career Academy on Monday to discuss the visit to High Tech High.

Seventh-grade teacher Sondra Coffey said North Whitfield Middle School’s recent “A Walk to Remember” is an example of what’s in store for next year. Individual projects were designed by students based on lessons learned throughout the year, then presented for the community to view.

“I stepped back and let them select, decide — everything,” Coffey said. “It was a great success for them.”

Anne Hensley, a math teacher at Eastbrook Middle School, said she was impressed during the visit to High Tech High that students didn’t seem anxious to get out of school.

“They were all involved and could talk to you intelligently,” she said.

Brochu said school leaders will evaluate ways to implement the approach in other grades. Educators from several elementary and high schools are interested in implementing the techniques, she said.

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Education