Brief Review: “Prepared”
“Prepared: What Kids Need for a Fulfilled Life” by Diane Tavenner, founder of Summit Public Schools, is a fascinating and unique approach to high school education and parenting and what’s required to get your students/children educated and prepared for life as an adult.
Different Goal
Prepared chronicles Dianne Tavenner’s career and journey in founding and creating a new charter public high school. She creates this school from scratch with an entirely different goal: to helps ALL kids (100%) be prepared for college and more importantly to lead a good, productive adult life — with a simple but unique and fitting tagline: College, Career, Life.
Some of the motivating questions she poses are:
- What skills does someone need in a rapidly changing economy?
- How does one prepare for a life that has financial security and meaning?
- How does a high school student figure out what they want out of life?
- What does it mean to engage in work that feels purposeful?
Employers in 2020 and beyond are looking for different skills than the past — including: 1) complex problem solving, 2) critical thinking, 3) creativity, 4) people management, 5) coordinating with others, and 6) emotional intelligence. How are we preparing our students to thrive in this world.
She sums it up nicely saying employers want: innovative thinking, independence, and initiative.
Different Student Outcomes
With a different goal it becomes equally important to measure different student outcomes. Here at Summit, Tavenner and her colleagues set out a different set of success outcomes and measures including the following:
In each area — they have leveraged substantial research and their own empirical learning to come up with new ways to approach high school education. For example 36 important inter-disciplinary cognitive skills have been distilled to 7 main Universal Skills e.g. Textual Analysis, Using Sources, Inquiry, etc. all shown here below:
Different Approach
And finally with a different goal and different expected outcomes, a different approach was required. With no prior experience running a school, but trained as an educators, Tavenner and her colleagues start from first principles — leveraging their teaching experience but also a myriad of research, good practices, and entrepreneurial spirit to figure out what works best for students and their ambitious goals in setting up a new type of school. For example, Tavenner refers to Dan Pink’s work on motivation 3.0 in Drive — autonomy, mastery, purpose (I describe a bit in this blog) — as one of the many foundational principles built on modern cognitive science and research that she and her colleagues used to build the culture and curriculum of Summit.
Tavenner cites 3 core ideas at the heart of Summit schools:
- 1:1 Mentoring
- Project Based Learning
- Self-Directed Learning
Mentoring
Again through research end experience, it was determined that students who have adult mentors achieve better outcomes that those who don’t. Summit took a very deliberate approach in facilitating this — creating well crafted, small, diverse mentor groups. The mentors’ goal is to meet regularly with the students 1–1 weekly to talk through the student’s goals and help them solve problems.
Uniquely, the mentors conduct home visits to learn about the student and their family and home environment — and the mentors work with the group for the entirety of their high school.
Tavennar says the the mentor gets to know the “whole kid” not just the student — and can assist with the broader part of career and live — not just college.
On mentorship Tavennar says:
I’ve learned in mentoring. I never ask, “What do you want to be?” or “What is your favorite subject?” Rather, I ask, “What do you like doing?” “What parts of that do you like most?”
I enjoyed that quote as it truly exemplifies the active-learning mindset that Summit aims to develop in their students. The message is: your particular interests and career goals will change throughout life — rather than focus on a single destination, focus on what you are doing now, learn from it, and use that experience and opportunity to grow and strengthen your capacity to learn in the future.
Project Based Learning
Tavenner claims that well-designed projects are the most effective learning approach to improve cognitive skills and therefore that is how Summit has organized its everyday learning.
She explains the point well by highlighting the contrast between projects at traditional school and projects at Summit. Namely, that at traditional schools, regular didactics, lessons, homework, etc. are used to teach the material. An infrequent project at the end of the lesson may be used as a treat — perhaps to reenforce or even tangentially just to enjoy or celebrate the subject matter. Often those projects are formulaic and not of the duration or intensity necessary to truly learn.
At Summit, however, its the opposite — they expect students to learn the material through the project itself. She describes the approach in the book:
Projects begin with a problem, question, or challenge that is relevant to the student and his community and life. They end with the student performing a task that directly addresses the problem, answers the question, or meets the challenge. As the student moves toward a solution, he gets timely and actionable feedback, so he improves as he goes. It’s not that students don’t learn about the industrial revolution or life cycles — they do. But they learn about them through a project that makes the connection to their life, and gives them the space to problem-solve.
For certain this is a compelling and engaging learning experience that more closely mirrors real-life.
Self-Directed Learning
One fascinating concept that Summit teachers advocate are habits of success. Rather than just focusing on the knowledge that the students need or preparing for test taking — they empower students to become self-directed learners and, interestingly, place a premium on the process itself — with all teachers instrucing and reinforcing the strategies. The five power behaviors — as they call them — for self-directed learning include: strategy-shifting, challenge-seeking, persistence, responding to setbacks, and appropriate help-seeking. When there’s a problem or set-back, they challenge the students to ask “what didn’t work well and why?”
Habits of Success include the development of skills in five categories:
- Healthy Development (e.g. Stress Management, Self-Regulation)
- School Readiness (e.g. Self-Awareness, Executive Functions)
- Mindsets for Self and School (e.g. Growth Mindset)
- Perseverance (e.g. Resilience, Academic Tenacity)
- Independence and Sustainability (e.g. Self-Direction, Curiosity, Civic Identity)
Through explicit instruction and via the 1–1 mentorship — Summit teaches and reenforces the importance of these habits of success.
Self-direction is also a key component of collaboration — an often touted important skill of the 21st century — but a challenge to achieve well in the traditional classroom. From Tavenner herself:
Collaboration requires real-world opportunities, and also self-direction, because you cannot be an effective collaborator if you’re not self-directed. Collaboration and self-direction, in turn, each require self-awareness. The most successful collaborators know themselves. They know who they are, what they care about, what they know, and what they don’t know. Knowing themselves comes from being reflective. Successful collaborators know their strengths and what they are working to improve, and they know what they can contribute.
In totality, the habits are part of something they refer to as the Building Blocks for Learning — work that has called upon decades of research in education, cognitive and learning science. The skills develop progressively — building on top of one another.
Putting it Together
By utilizing Self-Directed Learning, Project Based Learning, and 1:1 Mentoring Summit and Tavenner are able to work towards Habit of Success, Curiosity-Driven Knowledge, and Universal Skills. This summarizes the approach that Summit schools have arrived at not just for education but, more importantly, for life-long preparedness.
A summary of the vision as Tavenner sees it:
Kids are engaged. They’re interested. They’re doing real work, solving real problems. They work together. They get to know themselves and one another. They are driven by curiosity. Teachers coach, guide, mentor, and facilitate learning in a way that is inspiring, empowering, and sustainable. Of course kids learn to read and do math, but that’s just the beginning. The students see value in the learning and the adults approach the process in a way that works for kids.
Conclusion
The Summit schools appear to be impressively successful and wonderful learning institutions — expanding their footprint from one founding school to 11 today. They have also created the Summit Learning Program to help other schools benefit from their research and their approach. At last count the program has grown to include more than 300 schools, 2500 teachers, and more than 50,000+ students in 40 states.
This book is indeed a great read for educators and parents and those just interested in education. In his blog, Bill Gates lists the book as one of his top 5 reads of the year (2019) and states that it’s an “amazing guidebook for raising and educating our kids”.
References and Nice Summaries:
