A New Year's Wish for Transcendent Education in 2021 and Beyond

I can't imagine anyone being against what is being proposed here by Sean Slade and Ariel Tichnor-Wagner in their ASCD guest blog. A focus on the whole child is what scholars and practitioners in child development, as well as in the Ethnic Studies Movement have been proposing for a long time.  However, for this to happen, we need a radical redesign in our educational system given the current regime of high-stakes testing and accountability and their undue impact on the quality of instruction, and thusly learning, in our nation's classrooms.  

There are a few immediate policy decisions that we could make In this regard. For example, we could eliminate A through F School accountability ratings, and with this, high-stakes testing altogether–for us in Texas, the STAAR system of testing. Note: it has never been "just a test." It has always been a "system of testing" that impacts everybody's behaviors within it, from the school superintendent, to school leaders and principals, and teachers, poisoning curriculum and classroom dynamics with adverse impacts, in particular, on low-income, linguistically diverse youth of color.

This is separate from what we really need, namely, better assessments–and, as expressed below, meaningful, rich curriculum pertinent to students' lives and that reflects students languages, cultures, and community-based Identities as a matter of course.

As far as assessment is concerned, we need authentic, formative forms of assessments that are perhaps portfolio- or performance-based, tied into topics that are meaningful and policy relevant at all levels of society, e.g.,  local school boards, community boards, city councils, state boards of education, and our states' legislatures. 

We must eschew a decontextualized, chauvinist curriculum, and opt for one that embraces all of the concerns that have been laid out by the massive, indeed global, student movement of today that took place in the wake of the George Floyd killing, including: racial justice, structural racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, civil rights history, white supremacy, colonialism and decolonization, and many other critical topics. 

We have infantilized our youth as a nation for far too long. Our youth are already gaining access to all of this information via social media. What they do not have is an educational experience that is aligned, helping them to intelligently parse out the real news from the fake news, and that turns them into prodigious readers and deep learners, to boot. Bilingual education/dual language education need to be integral to this agenda, as well, since monolingualism for a complex world is not only insufficient, but at its core, assimilationist and white supremacist.

Only this kind of education will arm students with the critical knowledge, tools, dispositions, and frameworks they need to understand the world, and on that basis, to become positive agents of change, addressing social problems and movements that poise children to experience great, personal satisfaction, as well as a bona fide sense of transcendence that makes the whole learning experience worth the while. 

How hard is this? Certainly not any harder than our current, punishing system of high-stakes testing. We should have been doing this all along anyway. Children are sacred, not widgets. 

In Texas, the 87th 2021 legislative session begins in January and there will be proposals for just such changes. Stay tuned and be supportive. Our children's education should be a matter of urgent concern to us all.

In the meantime, may all have a wonderful New Year's Eve. 

And truly, all the best in 2021.

-Angela Valenzuela

Preparing students for an interconnected world

By

 ASCD Guest Blogger

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December 21, 2020

By Sean Slade and Ariel Tichnor-Wagner

As schools and educators face one of their greatest challenges in serving and supporting students during the COVID-19 crisis, it’s more important than ever to develop education systems that focus on the needs of the whole child.

The following is the first in series of short essays we will be publishing on this blog from ASCD’s recent report The Learning Compact Renewed: Whole Child for the Whole World (May 2020), which outlines steps that educators, communities, and decisionmakers can take to ensure that our students are knowledgeable, emotionally and physically healthy, civically inspired, engaged in the arts, prepared for work and economic self-sufficiency, and ready for the world beyond formal schooling. The essays focus on the need of student to prepared to thrive in an increasingly interconnected world—something current crises make abundantly clear.

The communities in which children live today are increasingly interconnected with the rest of the world. Global economic production and consumption chains, human migration, and the ease of Internet connectivity, and the proliferation of social media have broken down geographic and cultural boundaries. Our local actions—what we purchase or sell, who we vote for, how to get to work—can have ripple effects around the world. Likewise, an action that takes place halfway around the globe can affect our lives. As our world becomes smaller, local communities face challenges such as famine, violent conflicts, climate change, economic inequality, and human rights that threaten the health and safety of children and require complex global solutions. Therefore, an important facet of attending to the health, safety, engagement, and support of a child, and to ensuring that a child is challenged academically, is infusing the mindsets, knowledge, and skills needed to thrive in an interconnected world.

In this second decade of the ASCD Whole Child approach, we understand that teaching students how to engage with the world will help them both in their careers and in life pursuits. It will also help our communities understand that they are part of the broader world and have a role to play in working for the common good.

Abraham Maslow, 26 years after introducing his Hierarchy of Needs, added a sixth stage: self-transcendence. As Maslow defined it, “Self-transcendence seeks to further a cause beyond the self… This may involve service to others, devotion to an ideal (e.g., truth, art) or a cause (e.g., social justice, environmentalism, the pursuit of science, a religious faith), and/or a desire to be united with what is perceived as transcendent or divine.”

In Maslow’s hierarchy, youth develop their potential to be the best they can be and to assist others—to serve humanity. Improving oneself is admirable, but improving oneself for the betterment of those around you is desirable. We define this stage as altruism—reaching beyond oneself to take actions that improve one’s own community and communities around the world. We see altruism as a vital output of a whole child education.

In 2007, ASCD declared that that our education system should serve the whole child so that each child, in each community, is healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged. As we look toward 2020 and beyond, we affirm that a fundamental part of educating the whole child asks education systems and communities to ensure that each child is an active maker and shaper of the world they will inherit. This stage is about helping each and every child recognize that they are part of, and inextricably connected to, the rest of the world.

The communities in which children live today are increasingly more interconnected with the rest of the world. Global economic production and consumption chains, human migration, and the ease of Internet connectivity, and the proliferation of social media have broken down geographic and cultural boundaries. Our local actions—what we purchase or sell, who we vote for, how to get to work—can have ripple effects around the world. Likewise, an action that takes place halfway around the globe can affect our lives. As our world becomes smaller, local communities face challenges, such as famine, violent conflicts, climate change, economic inequality, and human rights that threaten the health and safety of children and require complex global solutions.

Therefore, an important facet of attending to the health, safety, engagement, and support of a child, and to ensuring that a child is challenged academically, is infusing the mindsets, knowledge, and skills needed to thrive in an interconnected world, empowering them to make our world a better place for themselves, one another, and the planet. To do anything less is to shortchange our youth and their futures.

To help plan, start, and grow your school’s whole child journey, join ASCD’s Whole Child Network.

About the authors

Sean Slade is the ASCD’s Senior Director of Global Outreach. Ariel Tichnor-Wagner, a former ASCD fellow of global competence, is a lecturer at the Boston University Wheelock College of Education & Human Development. 

Portfolios hold new promise for schools

Good piece on portfolio-based assessment in Maine.  New free, online technologies like Google Tools suite make this actionable.  It addresses criticisms folks have of old-school assessment that made use of extensive, tedious binders that are no longer necessary with today's technologies that provide exciting possibilities for millennials today—many of whom come to school already "wired" for this.  It's the educators that need to get their skills upgraded, myself included.

Here's a good website that illustrates the use of Google Tools: Tactical Technology Collective

-Angela

Portfolios hold new promise for schools

New digital tools let teachers, students assess work more comprehensively

Deborah Yaffe

District Administration, May 2016

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A teacher at Howe Elementary School in Wisconsin, above, shows a student the steps of how to submit a digital artifact into his own e-portfolio. (Photo: Photo credit: Digital Student Portfolios, Matthew Renwick/Thinkstock.com: 123dartist)

The 3,000 students in rural Maine’s Regional School Unit 19 begin compiling electronic portfolios of their schoolwork in pre-K, when the district issues every child a Google account.
In the elementary years, teachers snap and upload digital photos of handwritten work. In the upper grades, students accustomed to electronically documenting their school lives habitually upload essays and lab reports and record video of their oral presentations.
“By the time you hit middle school, the students are just doing it because that’s the way we do business,” says Kern Kelley, the Maine district’s technology integrator.

Decades ago, portfolio assessment—using samples of classroom work to document students’ progress toward learning goals—meant finding room for bulging binders stuffed with paper. But digital technologies that make it far easier to collect, curate, share and store student work have dismantled the physical barriers that once made portfolio assessment daunting. Schools are now taking a fresh look at the practice.

“The technology is so powerful,” says Mark Barnes, a former Cleveland-area teacher who now runs educational publishing company Times 10. “It gives educators an opportunity to create an ongoing conversation about learning.”

A new climate

Artists have always carried work samples in portable cases known as portfolios, and in the 1970s and 1980s, progressive educators began incorporating the idea into assessment programs. In the 1990s, Vermont and Kentucky experimented with statewide portfolio assessment systems, with mixed results.
State-level experimentation largely ended in 2002, when the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) ushered in a demanding annual standardized-testing regime. States abandoned alternative assessments, including portfolios, in favor of multiple-choice tests, says Stuart Kahl, founding principal of assessment company Measured Progress.
But the national climate has changed. Common Core and the state-level academic standards based on it stress the higher- order thinking skills and project-based learning that advocates say portfolio assessment promotes. NCLB’s replacement, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), permits states to incorporate alternative methods, including student portfolios, into their annual assessment programs.
ESSA takes effect amid a growing backlash against federally backed Common Core-linked standardized tests. That pushback, advocates say, won’t change portfolio assessment systems, which are often locally developed and designed to respect individual, non-standardized choices.
“When you can show parents a product, like an essay that started as a rough draft and was really clunky and then you show the growth, it’s a big win,” says Marty Creel, who started a pilot program as an administrator in Maryland’s Montgomery County Public Schools. “You don’t see people opting out of portfolio assessments.”
Whether they document the learning process or showcase the final product, portfolios offer richer insights than a set of test answers can, advocates say. “It’s an actual reflection of real work, rather than something that’s contrived and inauthentic,” says Robert Kuhl, principal of High Tech High Media Arts, a San Diego charter school.
Choosing which items to include in portfolios requires students to think about their own development in a way that traditional assessments don’t. “The portfolio is really the students showcasing their work, their growth over time—telling their own story of their learning,” says Helen Barrett, a retired education professor at the University of Alaska-Anchorage.
And unlike standardized tests, which parents and teachers often see as time- consuming distractions, the work showcased in a portfolio grows directly from classroom instruction. Portfolios are “inherently more fair and more useful” than standardized tests, Kuhl says. “The tests are incredibly discriminatory, and they’re a poor measure of whether or not one should graduate from high school,” he says.

User-friendly technology

With the aid of user-friendly and often low-cost technology, schools are turning to digital portfolios to track assignments, communicate with parents, and help students reflect on their own educational progress.
Using free software like the Google Tools suite, or fee-based online systems offered by various companies, students can compile portfolios that include everything from essays on Shakespeare to photos of ceramics projects to videos of a state championship sports game. And digital portfolios stay with students as they move through school and graduate, possibly providing raw material for college applications and resumes.
In Maine’s Regional School Unit 19, teachers take photographs of handwritten work using digital cameras equipped with special memory cards that wirelessly upload pictures. The district is experimenting with Wi-Fi equipped pens that can send teachers digital copies as students work through math problems.
Each year, students build voluminous electronic archives out of which they curate a smaller set of required assignments, entering links to each item into a spreadsheet that teachers can access at grading time. Students can access the same links later, for a refresher on past material. “Basically, a student is building their own knowledge base of everything they’ve ever done, and it’s a click away,” says Kelley, the technology integrator.
At 350-student Howe Elementary School in the Wisconsin Rapids Public Schools in Wisconsin, teachers use the FreshGrade electronic portfolio system to document six writing assignments each year.
Teachers can upload photos of young children’s handwritten work, audio of students reading their own compositions aloud, or video of conversations between teachers and students about their writing strengths and weaknesses.
Then, parents receive electronic notifications on their smartphone or computer of the postings and can access their children’s portfolios. “It has given parents a broader view into how their child is doing,” says Principal Matthew Renwick. “Parents aren’t just looking at a test score.”
In rural Grandview School District in Washington state, Grandview High School’s college and career readiness program requires every student to undergo a pre-graduation “exit interview” with a panel of community volunteers.
Students can draw on their digital portfolios—which include work samples, SAT scores and reflections on required job-shadowing assignments—to answer questions about their high school experience and future goals. “As we know as professionals, we have to be able to sell ourselves and be proud of the work that we have put forth,” says principal Kim Casey.

Drawbacks, challenges

Portfolio assessment has its challenges. Teachers need training in how to use digital platforms and how to plan assessments so they can provide students with “actionable feedback,” rather than just a number or percentage from a test, says Creel, now Discovery Education’s curriculum and instruction team leader.
Portfolio assessment remains principally a classroom- or school-based approach. And teachers and educators can expect high hurdles if they try to use it as a broader-based accountability tool. Such hurdles can be practical—Vermont’s 1990s-era portfolio assessment system encountered problems ensuring school-to-school consistency in grading.
But the barriers can also be philosophical: Portfolio assessment is designed to record student growth, encourage reflection and honor the idiosyncrasies of personal choice—not to promote standardization and uniformity.
Indeed, that’s the very source of its power, advocates say. Portfolio assessment “is more time-consuming than putting scan sheets through a computer,” says Barrett, the retired Alaska professor. “But on the other hand, from the student’s point of view, it’s much more rewarding. And who are we trying to benefit anyway?”

Deborah Yaffe is a freelance writer in New Jersey.

In Kentucky, Moving Beyond Dependence On Tests

Check out FairTest's "New York Performance Standards Consortium Fact Sheet," January 28, 2014. -Angela

In Kentucky, Moving Beyond Dependence On Tests

Originally published on Mon June 2, 2014 7:36 pm

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  A school in Danville, Ky., has become a national exemplar.

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The white, split-rail fences of horse farms line the two-lane road that takes you southwest from Lexington. It's a beautiful half-hour drive to Danville, Ky.
Settled in 1783, the town is proud of its history. In Constitution Square, across Main Street from Burke's Bakery, sits a tiny log cabin that was once the first post office west of the Allegheny Mountains.
A few minutes away, Bate Middle School is a more mundane '70s-era, red-brick building. But what's happening inside is anything but mundane. I've driven the 37 miles from Lexington to see one of the most closely watched efforts in the country to change the way schools assess student learning. Principal Amy Swann and the district's superintendent, Carmen Coleman, have completely overhauled their school's educational philosophy, moving away from standardized tests toward an approach called performance-based assessment.
Kentucky was the first state in the nation to adopt the Common Core and the tests that align with it. This spring, the 1,700-student Danville district thinks it's found a better way to teach the Core.
On a Wednesday afternoon in late March, I am waiting in the whitewashed hallway outside Diania Henderson's seventh-grade science class to see performance assessment in action. The seventh-graders are sporting dresses, jackets and ties. When the end-of-day bell rings, they file into the basement cafeteria, quiet and tense, with only a few poking each other in the sides, for a snack of cheese crackers and Capri Suns. It is the day of the Science and Math Performance-Based Assessments, or, as everyone calls them, the PBATs.
The whole seventh grade spreads out in small groups across the school building. Most of them are toting three-sided posterboards, like you might remember from middle school. But over the next two hours, as dusk gathers outside, it becomes clear that this is no ordinary science fair.
The entire curriculum at this school has been redesigned around interdisciplinary projects, which take several weeks to complete. The English and social studies seventh-grade PBATs were group projects that took place in the fall.
One by one, the students stand and give a 20-minute solo presentation with a PowerPoint or video. Separately, they've handed in 15-page research papers. They're giving these presentations to panels of judges made up of teachers from other grades or the high school, officials from a neighboring district, education students from the University of Kentucky, and fellow students.
When it's his turn, apple-cheeked Charlie Hall explains how he was able to lower the heartbeat of his Doberman, Rosie, and stop her from wolfing down her food by petting and talking to her.
Claire Strysick, with her hair in a neat bun, speaks about the impact of oil spills and presents the results of a chemical analysis of aquarium water polluted with petroleum.
A special education student and aspiring chef earns the top mark of "Outstanding" for a detailed presentation on surface tension and various seasonings.
I watch as student after student confidently answers questions about the steps of the scientific method, experimental design, math concepts like mean and median, and, most impressively, how the project relates to his or her life. And they listen respectfully to each other, giving helpful feedback.
Most projects are graded "outstanding" or "competent." A few are judged "needs revision," which means the students will keep working on them until they pass muster.
There is high-level learning on display here, from the math and science content to independent research and public speaking skills. Yet Bate isn't some gifted school. Of the 400 students, 69 percent qualify for free and reduced lunch, and 38 percent are members of minority groups. About a fifth are in special ed.
Schools Can Do Better
Five years ago, when Carmen Coleman took over as superintendent, Bate Middle School was on the state "watch list" because of its low test scores. The state commissioner even made a surprise visit to the school to decide whether to shut it down.
And so in the fall of 2011, Coleman asked her friend from graduate school at the University of Kentucky to take over as principal. "She didn't say, 'Come take over my worst school,' " Swann recalls with a laugh. "But I just saw amazing teachers and kids."
Swann got right to work, reorganizing the staff, introducing project-based learning and setting expectations with a "Danville diploma" that included social and emotional skills, ethics, technological literacy, career readiness. In 2013, the school was designated an "exemplar school" by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, one of just 25 in the nation.
"There's maybe 10 people around the country who really understand how to demonstrate authentic learning through student work, and two of them are in Kentucky," says Tom Vander Ark, an author and former schools superintendent who has written extensively on school improvement.
What makes the Danville experiment particularly noteworthy is that Kentucky was out ahead of the nation on adoption of the Common Core State Standards for English and math. Swann believes the standards are worthwhile, but thinks schools can do better than the tests that go with them. Though the new Common Core tests have been touted as improvements over what they replaced, she says they are really "the same old multiple choice," and adds, "I feel like on a standardized test you're really showing what kids don't know."
Swann and Coleman started looking for alternatives. Together, they visited award-winning schools all over the country, such as Big Picture Learning, an international network of over 100 schools that focus on individual passions, and High Tech High, a school in New Jersey that uses computers in every class.
They were most impressed with a group of 39 schools in New York state called the Performance Standards Consortium. Since 1997, these public schools have been exempt from state standardized tests. Instead of working from textbooks, students in performance schools create research projects, both solo and in groups, and present them for detailed feedback.
Students in these schools produce documentary films. They research position papers on immigration policy, conduct scientific studies of visual perception, and create mathematics puzzles.
"It makes a big difference if kids are doing something that they care about," says Ann Cook, the leader of the consortium and founder of Urban Academy Laboratory High School, a Manhattan public school in the consortium. According to the most recent data available, Consortium schools in New York City have a dropout rate that's less than half the city's — 5.3 percent compared with 11.8 percent. And these students also perform better in college.
From New York To Kentucky
In October of 2012, Swann traveled to New York to see a "moderation study," where teachers at different performance schools get together to review each others' assignments and examples of students' work. This is yet another way in which performance teachers collaborate and solicit feedback to improve the quality of teaching and learning.
One assignment in particular captured Swann's attention. "The teacher asked the students to design an amusement park ride. They had all the math in there, and physics, and it just really sparked something in me: that math doesn't have to be this boring class with lectures and standardized tests. I said, 'Let's take this back to Danville.' "
When she got back from New York that fall, Swann held an all-hands staff meeting in the school library. "I said, 'What if we designed a whole new assessment system?' They said, 'That's not possible.' " Swann described all the exciting teaching and learning she'd seen in New York. "They said, 'We like this better than the regular tests. We'll be behind you.' "
Swann asked for an anonymous vote on the new plan, and 98 percent said yes.
A bill to allow Danville to skip the state tests unanimously passed the House in April of this year but was shot down in the Senate. The state Department of Education says discussions to find alternatives are ongoing. Regardless of what happens, the district will still give the ACT and its practice tests in 8th, 9th, 10th and 11th grades. (ACT scores are tied to scholarship money for public university students in Kentucky, and the nationally recognized test will help them benchmark student learning.)
But the yearly grind of prepping for weeks for state tests is over for now. Swann says it's making a big difference in what teachers do every day, especially in their ability to tailor instruction to each student's needs and interests.
With standardized tests, she says, "from August to April I have to cover this content, and it doesn't matter if the kid is all the way up here, I have to pull them back down to review what they already know. And for the low-scoring kids, if I rush them through everything, they'll have a better chance of guessing it on the test. Everything with school ranking and teacher ranking is based on the tests, when instruction should be based on reaching the individual student and moving them forward."
Walk into a classroom at Bate and you can see students discussing their work together in small groups, clustered around a book or computer. The teachers circulate, ready to help where needed, or pull out a student to work one-on-one.
Kathy Merryman, the president of the Parent-Teacher Organization, has seen the evolution as her two children moved through Bate. I meet her in the hallway before the seventh grade PBATs, where she is helping a nervous student in a plaid shirt and bow tie rehearse his presentation.
"Every teacher on the staff is here for these kids," Merryman says, "and they are here till 6 o'clock tonight. And any teacher is willing to help out anyone who has a question. And they've all embraced performance-based learning, from the most traditional teacher to the most nontraditional teacher."
"I have never worked in a school before where the teachers are all on board with one concept and one idea," agrees Larry Ebert, a special education teacher. "Our goals are the same, and it's all about what's best for the kids. It really does take that collaborative aspect in order for the students to succeed."
Assessing Performance Assessment
Performance assessment has had a small, passionate group of supporters going back decades, especially among self-described progressive educators who think standardized tests are too blunt and too one-dimensional to measure the full range of how students learn.
It's related to two more widespread approaches: project-based learning and portfolios. Projects, like the familiar science fair, are usually a special add-on to the regular curriculum. Portfolios, which you may remember from art or creative writing class, seek to give a richer, multidimensional picture of students' capabilities by assembling a body of work.
These approaches allow students to follow their own interests and lean into their strengths. They are usually graded with a rubric, not a percentile. They address skills like presentation, communication, and teamwork that are common in the workplace but not part of most traditional schooling—or state-mandated testing.
On top of all that, performance assessment focuses on demonstrations of learning to outside evaluators. Students get a "reality check" by taking their learning before members of the community, and teachers who haven't taught them.
The experiment at Bate takes this approach a step further by making performance assessment the cornerstone of the entire curriculum.
Of course, there are reasons U.S. schools have gravitated toward standardized tests instead. They're (relatively) cheap, easily administered, and they carry the promise of some kind of "objective" measure. In other words, they're "standardized."
Performance assessment is the opposite of all that, and that is one reason it hasn't become widespread. With all its potential, performance assessment does set a very high bar for teachers and school leaders.
"To embrace projects and performance assessment as the core pedagogical approach is obviously a gigantic shift," says Vander Ark. Even Cook, the head of the consortium in New York, agrees that it's "not necessarily for everybody."
In fact, Kentucky itself implemented a statewide high-stakes assessment system in 1992 called "KIRIS," that included student portfolios of work, performance tasks, and tests featuring open-ended questions. A 1996 report by an outside consultant found that teachers and principals thought the system was good for instruction and raised expectations for students, but was burdensome and stressful to put in place. In 1998, the state dropped it.
However, as disquiet with standardized testing has grown, there's been a corresponding rise in interest in performance assessment. Supporters see it as an antidote that can be rigorous and address 21st century skills while also engaging students.
The chief state school officers in Kentucky and eight other states have formed a group known as the Innovation Lab Network. These states have adopted performance-based learning as one of their "critical attributes" for a successful school. (The other states are California, Iowa, Maine, New Hampshire, Ohio, Oregon, West Virginia and Wisconsin.)
Several of these states are moving to include a performance-assessment option in public schools. Vermont is taking similar steps, and there is a New England Secondary School Consortium of 400 high schools using it as well.
With performance assessment taking root in Danville, Swann and Coleman are now moving on to expand it to more places.
Coleman has left the Danville district to take a position at the University of Kentucky's National Center for Innovation in Education, where she hopes to oversee the founding of a performance-standards consortium like the one in New York. A neighboring district, Trigg, has expressed interest in joining Danville in giving up state tests.
"We need to make a gigantic shift," says Coleman, echoing Vander Ark. "Our kids are getting shortchanged because we're trapped in this rat race of preparing for assessments."
Amy Swann, meanwhile, has taken a new job as Chief Learning Officer at a national organization called Matchbook Learning, based in Atlanta. She will be working to turn around more bottom-five-percent "watch list" schools in Detroit, Newark, and soon possibly in New Orleans and other cities.
'Who Bubbles In Answers At Their Job?'
While there's no data yet on how the approach is working in Danville, support for the idea in the schools and the community is high.
Twelve-year-old Charlie Hall proves an excellent spokesperson for what's happening in his school. "I liked school before, but now that we've taken this initiative into project-based learning, I really, really like it," he says over Skype from his living room.
Growing up with his mother and stepfather in Danville, Charlie has always been a good student, cheerful and independent. Besides playing with his dog Rosie, he likes playing soccer and making videos in his spare time. His PBAT project, on Rosie's heart rate, included an astonishingly slick video, complete with soundtrack, that his mother says he shot and edited all by himself.
"Before, we would take tests like every single day and write long answers," he explains. "So the transition from that really tight monotonous structure to a very free-flowing environment in the classroom might be a little different at first."
But he says he sees a huge payoff in the long term.
"Let's get this straight — who is going to be bubbling in answers at their job? No one," he says, sounding like just the kind of engaged, motivated learner that Danville is trying to produce. "We're getting skills that we're actually going to need later on in life. It's really cool."

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