The Ron Clark Academy - Part 2

This post was published to HappySteve at 10:21:35 AM 30/10/2008

The Ron Clark Academy – Part 2

In Part 1 I described a lesson I observed at the Ron Clark Academy. It was a site to behold!

In this post I will describe the school in more detail.

Location

The school is deliberately located on the rough side of town, in a building that was formerly a rope factory. I believe there was also a brothel on site. They’ve purchased other nearby buildings with the intention of using them in the future.

Physical Appearance

On the front gate is huge metal lettering spelling out 7 key words, each from a different continent. I can’t remember what the words are. One was “reveur” – French for dreamer. Students visit a continent each year.

The foyer is an open space with stairs up to the second floor and a big blue slide that curls its way down. The big blue slide stands out enormously and really is the signature of the building. Students and teachers use the slide as they wish.

All the walls are covered by amazing graffiti paintings by the world famous graffiti artist “Totem” (http://www.mr-totem.com/totem2.html). They found out that Totem lived nearby and he agreed enthusiastically to do the art. Every room has rich murals by him. The entire school is like an art gallery!

Along with the big slide, the artwork establishes an immediate creative atmosphere in the school. None of the oppressive plain walls with square paintings that many schools have, which communicate the importance of order and conformity.

Bathrooms:

The bathrooms also have the beautiful graffiti, and much more besides – decorated mirrors, a dinosaur stuck on the wall.

Here are some photos:

The boys' toilet with a dinosaur.

The girls' toilet.

I remember hearing that when students at most schools are surveyed about what they would like to improve at their school, they very often put “clean bathrooms” at #1. What a powerful message students receive about themselves when the toilets are sparse, plain and dirty! Dirty because some students make them dirty, but then that feeds back onto itself. Dirty toilets will get dirtier, and it is demeaning for students, utterly undermining messages teachers are trying to send about conducting themselves with dignity.

If a school’s toilets are really nice and looked after, the students will look after them too, and their sense of dignity and worth will be powerfully established.

Themed Rooms:

Each room is themed and generally reflects what topics are being studied. Here are some examples:

The Gauntlet:

This room has a maze of tiny rooms separated by locked doors, around a central room blocked off with one way glass. They put problems in each room. When the student has solved the problem a key is dropped into the room so they can go to the next one.

Other Displays:

Student work is posted around the place. One noticeable example is a set of newspapers written by the students and featuring the students’ photos on them.

House System

There is a huge spinning wheel in the front foyer split into quarters representing the four   houses. Each is a named with a word from a foreign language – one of the words on the front gate of the school. Students are assigned a house by spinning the wheel when they join the school, in a ritual similar to the choosing hat in Harry Potter.

Teachers

The teachers all have a brilliant track record and many of them have a string of awards behind them. Their appointment to the RCA was via a video submission and comprehensive interviews etc.

The staff work very long hours, and are wholeheartedly committed. They get involved with the students’ personal lives, visiting the students’ homes, regularly taking the student out to places, for example to the theatre or hosting them in groups at their own homes for dinner.

The founder Ron Clark and cofounder Kim Bearden both teach full time, all day, as well as running the school. They work very very long days.

After School Program

Students have a choice of a very wide variety of afternoon activities after school run by the teachers and by local parents and volunteers. These change from term to term and cover every topic imaginable, and are often practical in nature.

Trips

Students visit 6 of the 7 continents by the end of their 3 years at RCA. This is funded by sponsorships and is integrated with intense study in preparation for the trip.

Homework

Student have homework each night which they must complete.

Parents are required to support them as a prerequisite to enrolment. They have regular lessons for parents, for instance teaching them Mathematical techniques and rules, so that parents can help their child at home. These are very well attended (jam packed!).

Parents     

Parents commit themselves to being actively involved in the school and supporting learning at home.

I shall conclude with my thoughts on what I saw in part 3.

The Ron Clark Academy - PART 1

Yesterday I watched, gob-smacked, as

 

the teacher leapt from table to table in a classroom with about 50 students seated in traditional rows. Every eye in the class was glued on him. Then jumped to the ground to the whiteboard and wrote up a sum.

The next 20 minutes resembled a cross between a tribe’s frenetic rituals on the first night of a full moon, and a soldier squad drill. It was rhythmic, energetic, and organic. He’d start a sentence, and then simultaneously the class would finish it, in song, seamlessly, energetically; all of them together, in strict but enthusiastic unison. There was no pause to this, nor any drama, nor any sense that this was a performance for the visitors. This was business as usual, standard operating procedure: invoking a plethora of short musical rules to solve a sum.

Over the 20 minutes there must have been 30 or so of these cooperative outbursts. Often, students would leap onto the tables simultaneously, all 50 of them, and dance as they sung, for just 4 or 5 seconds, before slipping back into their chairs instantly like nothing had happened, back to silent serious concentration.

Bang! They sung:

“When we begin, we begin together,

Parentheses first now let’s be clever”

Then, bang! Back to work. Really there was no distinction. The chanting was simply part of the communal thought process.

The teacher called another student to take over for a bit. Now this student lead the cooperative pack, playing the part convincingly and enjoying the same razor-sharp response times and focus. The student was treated seriously by the others. She called on various peers of various ages, and lead them through patiently when they were stuck. I had the impression ANY of the students could have come up and taken on this role.

For a while there this student stumbled herself, struggling to explain the next step in the solution, and then proposing an incorrect next step. Another student identified her mistake, but she didn’t see it, and the two took part in a public dialogue about it, until she DID see it. This dialogue was more mature than any adults who disagree. And when the girl realized she was wrong, there was no loss of face or embarrassment, and she continued the teaching role as confidently as before.

Now, the lesson continued for a full 2 hours with no break in the momentum and concentration. The teacher spent more time leaping from desk to desk than on the ground. Two hours of maths, then politics, and then history. 30% of students with a low-achieving background. The Year 5 students had only been at the school for weeks. No break in the concentration, no lowering of the energy level in the room. Every student lost in the lesson.

Despite this phenomenal performance in the students, the teacher kept publically chastising students for the most minor infractions:

-       A student gave an answer moderately irrelevant to the question.

-       A student failed to maintain full eye contact with the teacher, or the speaking student, for a couple of seconds.

-       When shuffling the seating, a student hesitated a moment when another student wanted the chair, rather than giving it up immediately.

No student argued with these chastisements, but went straight to the board and wrote up their name. They looked crestfallen but returned and renewed their effort.

I found it confronting that even response deemed inferior to the student’s proven potential brought chastisement. However there was also much praise – very hard-won, but not rare. The bar was clearly set very, very high, and yet students were routinely succeeding in jumping it, and then

BANG

Every student on their desks dancing and singing in praise towards the achiever, and then

BANG

On with the job.

On plenty of occasions a student struggled to contribute what was asked of them yet were not chastised at all. A Year 5 student was asked to provide reasoning behind certain dynamics relating to the health care issues in the US election. He struggled to respond. Here, no chastisement, rather some very long, patient pauses (patience from all students who looked and listened intently to what the young boy would say.) Eventually some gentle prompting from the teacher.

Clearly he knew the students very well.

They simulated an election debate a few times. An amazing moment occurred when one of the two students prancing around rhetorically on the desks, playing the role of the Republican nominee, replied to the Democrat role-player,

"If you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have done it four years ago"

Of one accord the student body roared with laughter. Every student understood the reference to the recent presidential debate.

The students’ manners and social confidence and presentation were phenomenal. In conversation with us, the visitors, they each introduced themselves and welcomed us and thanked us for coming, offering their hands to be shaked.

These kids were 9, 10 or 11 years old. They were happy, motivated, ambitious, and full of joy. They were very happy to participate and give things ago, despite the overwhelming pressure that they’re contribution must be their absolute best.

And still, over the entire 2 hours, not one student’s attention wandered (I know because I tried constantly to catch one out!)

And still, in the most explicable moments, just when it seemed the student body was settled into some kind of passive attention (I mean attentive, but passive),

BANG

they’d finish the teacher’s sentence for him, or leap up to dance and sing again

BANG

And no drama about this at all. There wasn’t any dramatic cue from the teacher to invoke the participation. All the way through there was this collaborative rhythm, and the more familiar the ground the less the teacher ever finished his own sentence by himself.

Talk about Jungian psychology! Was this mass hypnosis?

What I witnessed yesterday seemed both ultra-traditional, and entirely radical, and will take some time for me to digest and integrate into my current mindset (for instance, I would have interpreted the traditional rows of desks facing the front as a very bad first sign, and I found the public chastisement of students extremely confronting, although I must clarify it was done with great respect).

The teacher was Ron Clark, the school the Ron Clark Academy. This is the teacher who consistently took on classes in the bottom percentiles in Harlem, and consistently brought their performance up to the top percentiles.

I have SO MUCH more to say about the school – and in fact as I learnt more of the context I understood how it was possible for to that lesson to have been the real deal.

I have never seen anything even approaching this in my life.

But that will have to wait for PART 2!

On the maiden flight of the Airbus A380

We are waiting for take off on the new Airbus A380! Everyone is very excited because it is the maiden flight. Hope the pilot knows what he's doing!

Mobile post sent by happysteve using Utterli.  Replies.  mp3

The Inaugural Beginning to my Research Trip to the US

Tomorrow afternoon I fly to America with my Principal Stephen Harris, and colleague Gilbert van der Jagt.

The theme of our two week trip is 'innovation'. We want to see schools that are taking non-traditional approaches to education. We've been planning the trip for some time, researching various places over the Internet, and I've been particularly involved in locating schools in Philadelphia and New York.

I must confess, I am no geographer. When I first met with my boss about the trip he had to explain to me what cities in America were where in America. I really didn't know.

This is the diagram he drew for me on that day:

Needless to say I left the meeting still rather confused. It is probably a good thing he didn't label any of his dots.

Anyway, here is where we're going:

The Ron Clarke Academy, Atlanta (we'll attend their conference)

The 2008 T+L Conference, Seattle

Illinois Maths and Science Academy, Illinois

The Science Leadership Academy, Philadelphia

Delaware County Christian School, Pennsylvania

IS 339, the Bronx, New York

The Beacon School, New York

School of the Future, New York

Suffern High School, New York

I must warn you, I intend to blog quite madly during the trip, and document my personal experiences along with my professional observations. I'll put it all up here as I go, on the move, and then sort it out into better order when I get back to Australia. This is a sharp break with my normal blogging mentality of blogging occasionally but with care and attention.

I'll even try to stream live video when I can using http://www.ustream.com.

I'll send text messages using Twitter. See them at www.twitter.com/steve_collis

A Note About Mobile Phone Roaming in America:

I've done a lot of research about this in preparation for my trip. What I really wanted was for my HTC TyTN 2 phone to work in the US. Now, it's not too hard to get the phone component to work, although it's not cheap, but to get an Internet connection too (for email and sending messages on Twitter) costs a fortune. $20, Australia, per megabyte!

There are services that let you rent a SIM card, or an entire mobile phone, but they really only offer it for phone calls, not for an Internet connection - with one or two exceptions that are as expensive as me simply using my own mobile phone.

So what is one to do? I thought we were all hyper connected but I can't take my phone overseas and expect to use it without paying a mint.

My Solution:
What I finally have settled on, is renting a USB Wireless Internet card - from these guys. This will cost about $150 US for the fortnight, and give me unlimited data on my laptop. I'm going to try using Skype to make phone calls. I'm quite relieved to have found this solution, because I was beginning to get withdrawal symptoms simply at the thought of being disconnected from the Matrix for 14 days, during a really exciting time of my life.

Failed Attempt to Use Utterli to Broadcast Audio of Conference Presentations

Utterli is a webservice that allows you to ring a local number on your mobile phone and broadcast what you say over the phone to your website. It works very easily.

Can you use it to broadcast conference presentations? So far, it appears probably not. Here is a report on my experiments so far.

CONTENTS OF THIS POST:

1. Report on Poor Result Today

2. The Technique DOES Work for Interviews

3. Using uStream to broadcast live

(I got carried away drawing dogs and pasting them everywhere on one of the IWBs on display heh heh!! The poor guy trying to demonstrate its abilities! You can see his notes interfered with by my dog drawings)

1. Report on Poor Result Today

---------------------------------------------------

Now, at the ACEC 2008 Conference in Canberra earlier today my Deputy Principal Craig Linfoot presented his observations about digital virtual classrooms, from his research trip to exemplar schools in the USA, UK and Finland. Then he and I gave some quick tours of our digital infrastructures - websites such as http://hsconline.nsw.edu.au and http://beyondborders.edu.au, and http://pete.nbcs.nsw.edu.au

It occurred to me 10 minutes into the presentation that I could perhaps record the audio directly to the internet using the mobile blogging service Utterli. My friend Lucy Barrow had tried this earlier in the day, although I hadn't seen the results (actually I can't find them now - Lucy, how did it go for you, can you comment?).

So... I rang the Utterli number on my mobile phone. The resulting audio, here, is very poor (no fault of Utterli's of course):

Mobile post sent by happysteve using Utterli.  Replies.  mp3

I was sitting about 4 metres from Craig, who was presenting, and a similar distance from the audio speakers. The sound was clear and loud from the speakers.

My mobile phone was using a Bluetooth ear piece - perhaps this was not a good idea, because as you can hear from the recording the sound was barely picked up.

About 10 minutes in, I took the ear piece with me and put it on the lectern as I presented, and when I finished I left it there for Craig.

This improved the quality, but it is still not nearly good enough to be a viable way of recording and transmitting presentations. I suppose that mobile phones are designed for people speaking directly in the microphone, and indeed are designed to exclude ambient noise.

I'll keep experimenting.

Apologies to everyone who visited this post earlier on and tried to listen - it must have been disappointing.

A worthy experiment, to be sure, and I'll leave the audio here for you to see the results.

2. The Technique DOES Work for Interviews

-------------------------------------------------------------

On the other hand, you can definitely use a mobile phone with Utterli to record an interview. I tried this here: /2008/08/impromptu-inter.html . In this case no Bluetooth ear piece, just me holding the mobile in between me and the victim, ahem, I mean interviewee. I wonder if this would have been clearer if I had used the Bluetooth earpiece like an interviewer's microphone that is passed backward and forward.

Lucy Barrow has used Utterli to record interviews quite a few times - see here: http://lucybarrow.edublogs.org/

3. Using uStream to broadcast live

------------------------------------------------

This works an absolute treat! Get a free account at ustream.com, click "Broadcast Now", and bang! You're transmitting video and audio to the net! uStream can automatically send a message over the text messaging system "Twitter.Com" so people will know you're broadcasting. They can text chat with each other and to you, too.

This worked fine today... after I remembered to press "Start Broadcast", which was unfortunately 10 minutes before the end.

You can have uStream keep a recording for future access too. I'm going to start using uStream more and more.

So why muck about with Utterli if uStream works so well? Ah just that Utterli is embedded directly into your own website, which is not the case for uStream broadcasts and recording, Also, to broadcast with uStream I believe you need a computer/laptop, but Utterli works on any phone or mobile phone.