Casady School Strategic Academic Plan

STRATEGIC ACADEMIC PLAN

by Josh Bottomly Associate Head of School for Academics

For the past 12 years, I have taught a Senior English seminar on J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy Lord of the Rings. For three months, my students and I traipse across Middle Earth with Frodo and Sam from the Shire to Mount Doom. Notably, Joseph Campbell’s archetype of the “hero’s journey” provides the lens through which we interpret the hobbits’ quest. As Campbell points out, every hero’s journey begins with a call to a larger purpose. Frodo and Sam leave their cloistered hobbit holes in hopes to save the Shire from Sauron. That’s their why. Their transcendent purpose.

The story of our new schedule and our Strategic Academic Plan begins like Frodo and Sam with a call to a common purpose. After listening to the parent, faculty, and student surveys conducted in the winter of 2016, we have spent the last 24 months in a Strategic Academic Plan focused on what we believe to be a more holistic educational approach. One of the key initiatives in this forwardthinking, outcome-driven plan includes a new daily schedule for Middle and Upper Divisions beginning in 2019-2020, along with a set of pedagogical and programmatic distinctions that will shape our future curriculum.

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Over these last two years, students, faculty, and administration have given their input into “what” a new schedule could look like. The process has been intentional from the beginning, including extensive research, and consultation with Independent School Management (ISM), a nationally-renowned organization known for its expertise in schedule research and design.

As we collaborated as faculty and administration to develop this Strategic Academic Plan, our why became clear that we wanted to create a schedule where our focus could be based on: • Student Wellness • Student Engagement • Durable Learning • Community Engagement • Continuing our Mission to Develop Skills and Knowledge

STUDENT WELLNESS

STUDENT ENGAGEMENT

“I THRIVE. I live a life of balance, purpose, and joy.”

“I ENGAGE. I am a member of local and global communities, embracing the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.”

When Middle and Upper Division students returned to campus this fall, they stepped into a new daily schedule, one that reflects these five priorities, leads to “peak” learning opportunities, and stays true to Casady’s mission of developing excellence, confidence, and integrity in its students.

In Upper Division, for example, a later morning start allows for more sleep. The research continues to show that adolescents need between nine and eleven hours of sleep for optimal cognitive development. Schools that have shifted to a later start report improved grades and attendance.

In Middle Division, the schedule includes more unstructured breaks for play (four-square is a big deal at Casady!), and a longer advisory time to thicken relationships between teachers and students.

Another key wellness benefit to the new schedule is that students will have fewer classes each day.

This will allow for a slower, gentler pace in both divisions. There will be fewer transitions, both during the day and at night for homework. All of these customized changes were intentionally made to promote Casady’s commitment to students’ holistic wellness and deeper-level learning.

We’re discovering more about the brain and learning than ever before. Consequently, one thing we’re learning about the brain that is as true in 2019 as it was in 1947 is that our brains are hardwired to engage “desirable difficulties.” Ironically, while the brain was not designed to think, the cognitive science reveals that, in fact, our brain likes to think when it is challenged with questions, real problems, and achievable outcomes. Daniel T. Willingham makes clear in his critical study, Why Don’t Students Like School?, that we learn at the deepest level and perform at the highest level when students are engaged in learning that sparks poesis, the Greek word for “meaning-making”.

One of our most exciting new learning spaces is our Middle Division Makerspace. Students are provided the opportunity to get their hands dirty and learn through making. In 8th grade history, for example, students engage with history by creating a Powtoon presentation over different Civil War battles. Students research information about a key Civil War battle like Gettysburg or Antietam. They write a script, synthesize the information, then design the graphics that synchronize their recorded voice reading the script. Students then present their final products to peers as a way to play the role of teacher. This was such a hit project that soon after 7th grade Latin students did a similar project in Powtoons on the Trojan War.

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Making Learning Stick - Boosting Student Memory through Durable Learning Practices

Examples like these highlight that sustainable engagement happens at the golden intersection between being challenged by, and loving, what our students are learning by doing.

Our Strategic Academic Plan is simply reclaiming what has served as the primary benchmark of a successful Casady education. Engagement has been and will continue to be coterminous with a challenging curriculum that seeks to set our students’ heads, hearts, and hands on fire for poesis-shaped learning!

Did you know that our brains are wired to forget? Based on a landmark study, people forget along a predictable curve. In an hour, students will forget more than half of what they learn. In a day, they will remember only a third of it. And it doesn’t stop there.

Research shows, however, there are ways to boost learning.

• Peer-to-peer explanations. When students explain what they learn to peers, fading concepts are retrieved, strengthened, and consolidated.

• Spacing & Spiraling. Research shows that students remember more when key lessons are reviewed in spaced intervals throughout the year.

• Frequent formative assessments. Dozens of studies show that frequent practice assessments (i.e. quizzes and tests) boosts long-term retention and reduces test stress.

• Interleaving. Mixing up similar problems and concepts (i.e. ABC CBA BAC) helps students think on their feet and encodes learning more deeply.

• Dual Coding. Pairing text with image makes it easier to remember what’s been read and seen.

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DURABLE LEARNING

“I LEARN. I explore the world with inquisitiveness and enthusiasm. I grow in the face of challenge.”

In its simplest form, durable learning is learning that sticks in long-term memory. The cognitive principle that guides durable learning is that whatever

students think about is what they remember.

Cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham puts it more succinctly: “Memory is the residue of thought.” Part of the intentionality behind expanding instructional time in our new schedule is to allow more “vertical blocks” of time ranging from 55-minutes to 110-minutes for deeper-dives into the curriculum. These longer blocks promote interdisciplinary, collaborative, and innovative learning that allow students to think divergently, negotiate conflict, and solve problems. Studentcentered learning at its best involves students doing the heavy cognitive lifting with little or no assistance from the teacher. Maria Montessori puts it most eloquently: “The greatest sign of success for a teacher is to be able to say, ‘The children are now working as if I did not exist.’”

One of the things our Strategic Academic Plan will allow us to do is examine less durable practices.

Since the industrial era, the most efficient way to deliver instruction is through “the shampoo method” of teaching - tell, test, repeat. This method suds the brain for a little bit but doesn’t stick to the brain.

It’s efficient, just not effective. The Lawrenceville School’s science department is famous for proving “the sud effect.” After their students took final exams in all core courses, they had their students take a simplified version of the final after summer vacation. The final exam average in May was a 87%.

The final exam average in September was a 58%.

“Not one student retained mastery of all important concepts covered by the course.” Following this experiment, Lawrenceville completely rethought how their courses were taught, eliminating almost half of their content and dropping the AP curriculum to emphasize deeper learning.

What Lawrenceville discovered, and what we are discovering is that what we might call “traditional” teaching — i.e., the passive transmit-recall-test model aka. “shampoo method” — might expose students to information and ideas and procedures, but it doesn’t do much else, unfortunately, and the brain science argues against its long-term retention.

Seniors in our Creative Writing seminar. They write, sketch, and publish their own children’s fairy tale. The seniors storyboard with their English teacher, Mrs. Finley. They collaborate with the arts teachers on their visual drawings. Our Technology Integration and Innovation Specialist, Dr. Fryer, then teaches them how to digitally publish via eBooks on Amazon. The seniors’ “final exam” involves a public performance of their book to an authentic audience - the Primary Division students! What a powerful cross-disciplinary, cross-divisional moment of durable learning.

Or AP US History. In the spirit of March Madness, students in Dr. Wardrop’s advanced course participated in “presidential bracketology” that included a bracket with all 45 presidents. Students randomly selected a president and created a Google slide that included a photo and name of their president, an argument for why their president should advance to the next round, and a counter argument for why their opponent should not.

Students then voted on who should advance to the “Sweet 16”, “Elite 8”, and “Final 4” based on each president’s profile. This “gamified learning” experience not only developed research and persuasive writing skills, but it excited competitive fun among the students in the process.

Finally, examine our students’ experience in Honors Physics. Students in Mr. Zamarripa’s course research and build whatever form of cocoon they can come up with using toothpicks, a glue gun, and an egg.

The objective is for the design to be able to absorb the concussion of being dropped from the second floor without the egg breaking. They use their phones to video the drop and calculate the rate of fall, the speed, the force of impact, and many other physics calculations. This kind of “hands-on mindson” activity boosts the kind of durable learning that typically results in our students earning mostly 4s and 5s on the AP exam.

The good news is that we’re already integrating into our curriculum powerful peak moments of sticky, durable learning!

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COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT

positive activity within the community is rooted in kindness and empathy. Most importantly, we aspire for students to graduate Casady knowing that they are a part of something larger than themselves.

SKILLS & KNOWLEDGE

“I SERVE. I am kind. I act with integrity, empathy, and compassion.”

We’re excited to increase opportunities for Casady students to get outside the gates. Notably, our Strategic Academic Plan explores ways we can enhance friendships with organizations and causes with our local and global neighbors. Moreover, our faculty are eager to plunge their creative energies into designing curriculum across all divisions that authentically integrates experiential, serviceoriented, place-and-community-based learning.

A great example of this kind of dynamic learning involved Mrs. Fryer’s 3rd grade Language Arts class. During the Thanksgiving season, the 3rd grade students read a book entitled Granny Torrelli Makes Soup. Afterward, through the organizational efforts of our Service Learning Director, Mrs. O’Melia, the students then went to the Oklahoma City Golf and Country Club where they made soup using recipes from the book, and then donated the soup to the Homeless Alliance. After this authentic, service-oriented learning activity, students returned to Casady to write about the book, and then using iPad Pros, had the chance to create videos of the experience and share their creations with their classmates.

It’s this kind of community engagement that we aspire to bake into our curriculum. We want Casady students to become agents of social innovation where the animating vitality and force of their

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“I INNOVATE. I have voice. I commit. I inspire others to action.”

One of the great challenges for any teacher is to balance teaching content and skills. Even though we live in a Google-fied world where students have powerful little computers (aka iPhones) at their disposal 24-7, our students still need to master a fundamental domain of factual knowledge. The guiding cognitive scientific principle that still holds prominence among us is that factual knowledge precedes skill. Thinking well requires knowing facts, therefore, we will remain committed to ensuring that Casady students acquire background knowledge that are requisite to building cognitive skills.

At the same time, our teachers will adopt new methods of teaching that combine the science of learning with the art of learning. One of the ways we will strategically accomplish this is through forging targeted partnerships with proven educational organizations like Harvard’s Project Zero, Stanford’s Malone School Online Network, Philip Exeter Humanities Institute, and the Global Online Network. These nationally recognized organizations are on the leading edge of brain research and educational practices in pursuit of

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teaching excellence to best prepare students with the skills they will need to master for success in a future where a majority of the college majors have not even been invented yet.

Part of our Strategic Academic Plan has led us to have done a good deal of futurist research in order to frame not only what we teach but how we teach, for students’ skills, habits of minds, and behaviors will mean as much to their success as will their acquisition of knowledge. Analysis of future signals and trends make predictions about the kinds of people who will succeed in this century. If we look at just two pieces of research, we find striking similarities in the predictions.

The National Network of Business and Industry’s “Common Employability Skills” framework lists competencies in mathematics, reading, writing, oral communication, and problem solving (hallmarks of liberal arts learning, which will continue to be the core of Casady’s program of study). But this same framework lists planning and organizing, decision making, customer service, technological understanding alongside more traditional school curricula. Teamwork, adaptability, and initiative are also equal players with these other competencies.

The American Association of Colleges & Universities makes similar recommendations, which can be found in the L.E.A.P Initiative research. Their

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What are we to make of these recommendations?

First, you can see that the time-honored liberal arts program still stands as the core of what students should learn, and that has been — and will continue to be — true at Casady. But the key skills and knowledge domains that extend beyond just core content are too consistent across these various sources to ignore. How do we teach teamwork, ethical reasoning, problem solving, and integrity?

Again, the answer lies less in what we teach and more in how we teach — and how we assess the impact of our teaching. These are not the kind of skills one can necessarily teach or assess effectively through tell, test, and repeat methods.

Instead these are skills that must be developed and assessed through real-world problem solving and project-based learning that requires collaboration, negotiation, compromise, and project management.

Bloom’s Taxonomy underscores that the highest form of rigor is creating knowledge for the real world. The highest form of relevance is applying skills to the real world. Rigor and relevance at its peak positively engages the whole child.

MID-21ST CENTURY TRANSDISCIPLINARY SKILLS One study, published in The Harvard Business Review, found that ‘‘the time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50 percent or more’’ over the last two decades and that, at many companies, more than three-quarters of an employee’s day is spent communicating with colleagues.

Another study found that 40% of people in the United States work as contract employees, moving from one client’s project to another. This is expected to grow to 60% by 2025.

Projects like this one in our Middle Division are not only preparing our students for their futures, but providing them an authentic and engaging learning experience in their present. Consequently, these kinds of projects will help our students stand out in a sea of homogenized college applications; but, more importantly, prepare them for the kind of learning that is already happening across the higher education landscape in places like Stanford’s d.school, Harvard’s Innovation Lab, MIT’s PlayLab, and OU’s Innovation at the Edge.

The good news is that as we re-frame our liberal arts curriculum with research-based frameworks and practices in our Strategic Academic Plan, we are able to deliver the same content but in ways that improve student retention, understanding, and transferability. Additionally, when students work in groups, tackle problems in teams, and engage in authentic assessments of understanding like the Dystopian Society project, we are able to have them practice the “soft skills” so consistently called for in futurist research. This re-framing of curriculum — this shift of pedagogical approach (i.e., how teachers teach) — isn’t a categorical break with the past; rather, it’s an evolution of practice that honors the best of what we’ve always held true in education at Casady as we find ways of preparing students for the world they will inherit.

One of our newest signature learning experiences in the Middle Division is a 5th grade interdisciplinary project in English and Geography.

After reading the book Among the Hidden, students work in teams to create their own society complete with their own flag, educational system, laws with rules to follow, healthcare, workforce, housing, and government. This is topped off in our new Makerspace, where students build their city in the digital world of Minecraft! For our 5th grade students, this project involved all sorts of messy challenge where working in teams required them to collaborate, negotiate, resolve conflict, manage personalities, iterate around peer and teacher feedback, and ultimately make decisions that required both consensus and compromise.

Teams wrote a summary paper, presented their final products to their peers, and then displayed their final products in the pod as part of our gallery of deeper-level learning.

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OUR HOW

Durable Learning and Student Engagement will be…

Collaborative: Students will learn in purposefully collaborative environments where they are asked to work as a team to accomplish a goal.

OUR WHAT - THE BRIDGE Our Strategic Academic Plan is designed to help us build a bridge between our mission and our Portrait of a Graduate.

“Our Why” will provide the anchor.

Interdisciplinary: Students will learn to think across, rather than within, traditional fields of study, and draw on multiple disciplines at once to solve a problem.

Engaging: Students will learn in environments where the material enlists and awakens excitement in them to pursue mastery.

And our pedagogy (method of instruction) and schedule will provide the structural framework.

As we move forward, we will seek to achieve our Strategic Academic Plan in concert with our new daily schedule in the following ways:

Authentic: Students will learn in ways that connect them to real-world issues, problems, and applications.

• be intentional that durable learning is collaborative, interdisciplinary, engaging, authentic, customized (student-driven), and relevant.

Relevant: Students will learn in ways that matter to them and directly apply to their interests, experiences, and aspirations.

• provide ongoing support, resources, and time to help teachers continue their pursuit of excellence in teaching and learning

Customized/Student-Driven: Students will learn in ways where they are given voice, choice, and agency to pursue academic goals of personal challenge, curiosity, and passion.

• adopt new practices (and retain successful ones) based on brain research and trusted educational groups • institutionalize a structure for continuous “lead learning” and collaboration among faculty • incorporate a wide variety of approaches to assess for optimal, long term learning including problem-and-project based learning • blend learning in a variety of physical and digital ways to promote both rigor and relevance • collaborate across discrete disciplines and academic departments to create crossdisciplinary and interdisciplinary curriculum • look for opportunities to get beyond the gates of Casady to engage our local and global community in pursuit of responsible citizenship and solidarity with our neighbors • authentically integrate service learning into our curriculum • make our classrooms active “doing” places

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• enhance student engagement, sustaining it over time, through emphasizing depth, challenge, agency, risk-taking, intrinsic motivation, and mastery-orientation • employ tools to more effectively measure holistic student engagement — behaviorally, cognitively, and emotionally • use content as a vehicle to teach competencies — the ability for students to transfer a skill or knowledge across multiple disciplines and real world contexts • customize learning to increase student choice, to drive content, to earn credit, and to create courses/learning experiences • expand Post-AP curriculum to promote distinctively advanced student-centered learning (i.e. Stanford’s MSON courses, senior English/ history seminars, etc.)

• personalize and expand ACT/SAT test prep resources to minimize student anxiety and maximize student potential for college admissions and academic scholarships

THE JOURNEY AHEAD We believe Casady’s best days are ahead of us. We acknowledge that the path forward will bring real challenge. William Bridges’ apt analogy comes to mind. Any organization that embraces a journey of transformation will pass through the “neutral zone“.

Our natural human impulse will want a clean, clear, straightforward arrow of direction that gets us safely to the other side. No tension. No discomfort.

No disequilibrium. Unfortunately that’s just not how growth works. The pathway of real progress is a messy squiggly arrow.

Knowing this, we recognize that we have an opportunity to model for our students the kind of courage, empathy, and compassion we want to form in them. Most importantly, we see this journey as an opportunity to come together as One School. Because in the end it all harkens back to our common purpose. And our compelling why. Which is our kids. And our deep-seated commitment to their well-being and their experience of deeper-level learning that fulfills our One Great School’s mission.

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