Newton Parent Jack Cheng wrote a great piece that came out in Commonwealth Magazine over the weekend in which he called on Newton (and other districts) to entirely rethink how we approach high school. He wants us to get creative in our thinking.
He offers up some ideas, with the caveat that his is just one approach, but the basics here are to entirely throw out what we know and build again. He calls on a later start time, like 9 or 930, as well as a different kind of school week:
Math and sciences probably need demonstrations and explanations before students can do independent work, so we’ll have live Zoom classes for those on Mondays and Thursdays. On Tuesdays and Fridays, the math and science teachers will have given students packets to work on and be available for “office hours” on Zoom.
English and History would be flipped. On Mondays and Thursdays, students would have readings with reading guides to fill out, videos to critique, or poems to annotate. On Tuesdays and Fridays, those classes would meet on Zoom and discuss what they thought about the class materials.
And on Wednesdays? Well, that’s the magical part. Go read the piece and come back here to discuss it.
Other than the specific schedule, it’s quite similar to what will be happening.
Chuck. Thank you for posting this delightful and thoughtful article by Jack Cheng. I particularly related to his discussion about Wednesday field days with field trips since those remain some of my fondest memories of my long since passed days in the Newton school system and the geology courses I was privileged to take at Tufts during the 1950s. They cemented my interest in the history of this state and the marvelous and thoroughly unique assortment of rocks and strata we have in this area that I still stop to observe and pick over.
Just some short thoughts:
(1) I’m sure that what Jane says about the status of the City’s program is right on. I make presentations at several special ed program sessions each year. I’m bowled over by just how good our teachers are, how receptive the kids are to learning new things, and the fun and laughter both students and teachers add to what could otherwise be a dull or overbearing learning process.
(2) That said, I think all Jack Cheng is trying to do is add some spice to what’s already there to compensate for the deficiencies of having most everything presented via ZOOM.
(3) Newton is blessed to have many of America’s best and most gifted professionals, educators, political leaders, government experts, a broad range of entrepreneurs and citizen activists. Perhaps some of these would be willing to help with presentations and field trips.
(4) It seems to me that the overall challenge is to promote all relevant aspects of the learning process, hold student’s attention through God knows how many ZOOM sessions they will be receiving; and equally important, to boost the morale and value of parents, students and teachers during what is certain to be a difficult winter. I think Jack’s proposal can help expedite all these goals if implemented with full sensitivity to everyone involved.
The latest Boston Magazine has
Newton South ranked 17th in the state.
Newton North is ranked even lower.
Mr. Cheng is correct.
Something needs rethinking…
Paul,
Are the rankings a reflection that NPS is failing its high school students?
Email arrived tonight from NPS with new school start times:
High School – 9:15 a.m. and 3:55 p.m.
Middle School – 8:30 a.m. and 3:05 p.m.
That will put a smile on my high schooler’s face
I like the later start time, but the 3:55pm end time? What happened to the idea that there would be opportunities for in-person activities and connections through extracurriculars, clubs, and sports?
DF again pushed something onto families, without community input. 3:55 PM is LATE. What about clubs and sports? How are kids going to get after school jobs (baby sitting)? And scheduling monthly orthodontic appointments will be a nightmare. Or if a child has the need to see any specialist. Fridays at 3:55 PM is very late. At least toss my kid a 2 PM dismissal on Fridays.
Starting high school at 9:15 is a good idea. Given the late start, no school on Wednesday, and how many school days are being lost, I am totally OK with ending at 4 pm. The kids should learn something, right?
“Jason Colet.” Looking at the scale in the morning is an imperfect way to assess how fat I am. That being said it is still valuble information. What metric do you suggest we use to compare the how well the Newton Public Schools are doing relative to our peer districts?
@Jason-
As Greg Reibman would say,
I’m just the messenger here.
You would have to ask the writer of the article or the editor of Boston Magazine if they think the NPS are
failing their high school students.
Personally, would you choose a school district with high schools rated in the high teens or the top ten?
How do you know there is no school on Wednesdays? My kid doesn’t have her schedule yet? NSHS hasn’t released any firm information on class schedules.
JP and Paul Green,
My question is mere curiosity. Can we take solace in the fact that NPS are excellent? These discussions about ranking aren’t important. Yet, this is the world we live in where people are consumed with rates, grades, classifications, types, and order. Sometimes these are for naught.
Jack Cheng’s piece exemplifies the creative, out-of-the-box thinking that is greatly needed right now. I hope that our teachers and school-level leaders are considering some of these innovative ideas, as they spend these two weeks preparing for students. However, we must also hold the district leadership and elected officials (i.e. Mayor and School Committee) accountable for the still unfolding poor planning process. Whether you favor hybrid or remote, early or later start times, I think we can all agree that the execution and communication of the Fall school plans has been a failure. Information that affects students, families, teachers and everyone within their constellations is dropped late, reversed often and poorly explained. We need to make sure our voices are heard frequently and loudly during these upcoming weeks. Perhaps regular, large rallies at City Hall would raise the profile of the dissatisfaction I am hearing from many families around Newton?
I am glad to see we will have a healthy start time.
Today would have been our normal return to school day. We are just over a week away from the delayed start date and we still have no idea what the schedule will look like. Five days a week? Four days a week? Do the start and end times correlate with actual online instruction?
Families with students who receive special ed services have not received any detailed information about service delivery and what any in-person learning might look like.
I don’t know of any other town that is this behind in terms of planning. It’s incredible. Families are being left to scramble at the last minute to try and make this work.
Glad to see the later start times! There has never been a decision made that makes everyone happy, however, and although it works for my family, I appreciate the frustrations of those whose family schedules just took another wrenching turn.
I wonder if we could pivot this thread to suggestions for creative ideas for teachers to implement during the school year.
Here’s some Zoom teaching ideas I didn’t have room for in my article:
-guest lectures (my son took a summer class and he said the best part were the guests he never would have met otherwise)
-random locations. Science teachers could Zoom with their class from Walden Pond, while English teachers could Zoom from… Walden Pond. Or heck, just put up different Zoom backgrounds to illustrate your classes
-the HR consulting firm Humanyze sets up Zoom lunches between random employees to facilitate interdepartmental camaraderie and communication, why not a voluntary program like that in the HS? So awkward! And yet… who knows?
-history class student Zoom presentations could be done on location at the Custom House, or other historic locations
-Assignments could be in the form of short videos–a TikTok rap about calculus?–or a website
-parent involvement in Kindergarten and first grade was cute, then embarrassing for the kid, then in middle school embarrassing for everyone involved. But in high school, with teenagers thinking more about the world and their place in it, maybe its time for parents to come back to explain their jobs to the class
As the form of the school year becomes clearer, we can (and will) continue to complain, but let’s supplement those complaints with imagining some of the best possible situations for our kids given the circumstances.
Regarding those rankings, by looking at the data provided to evaluate schools, the student to teacher ratios and average class sizes are definitely not accurate for Newton South. I’d assume that other schools manipulate their data as well to show better class sizes and smaller student to teacher ratios.
It seems like test scores are highly utilized for the rankings, and as so much about test scores (SATs and APs in particular) reflect a family’s ability to hire tutors or pay for test prep classes, I’d say that the rankings reflect more on a school district’s wealth and not the actual teaching and learning happening in the buildings.
How does Boston Magazine rank in comparison to its peers (low in my opinion)? It stays in business by putting out rankings of all kinds. The Best _______________ in Boston, then sends out a plaque to the winners which is hung on a highly visible wall in an office, entryway, etc.
Is it a credible source of information about the quality of anything it ranks? If you believe it to be so, can you provide your reasons for your thinking?
This should be interesting – will this new schedule become a factor in this decision?
“On Thursday, September 10, North and South principals will present to the School Committee on the proposal for fall athletics at both high schools. We are required by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to seek approval from the School Committee on participation in fall sports offered in our respective leagues.”
@Jack Cheng – Thanks for your article, your comments and your constructive attitude.
I love Jack’s ideas. So many parents and retirees in Newton have interesting jobs and could be amazing guest speakers. I would love to talk to kids on the banks of the Charles River about how it used to be in the Dirty Water era, what it took to make it cleaner, and what challenges still remain.
This summer the LigerBots ran a summer camp for elementary school students taught by high schoolers. Both sides got a lot out of that. One of my favorites was watching a recent graduate teach a dance class in which the young kids danced in their backyard while the teacher danced in her room. The team learned quite a bit about breakout rooms and what it takes to keeps kids engaged on a screen.
One of my favorite moments came during an end-of-session contest quiz. The kid who won got to choose the recorded alarm that the student leading the program would use for the next two weeks. The result? Kids screaming into their computers and laughing… and a very loud alarm for a tired 17-year-old.
My daughter has also taken part in a couple of different mentorship programs (the LigerBots have one of those too) and that’s proven very interesting. The point is there’s a lot we can do here.
As I high school teacher I enjoy hearing Jacks ideas. I’d like to also let him and others know that most of these ideas already exist, have been thought of and explored teachers, and have been in the works (except the on-location ones).
I’d like to ask a few questions: what I would LOVE to do is use Wednesday’s (if we’re meeting? I don’t know our schedule yet but I’m assuming we’re meeting) to meet with small groups of students and have those office hour sessions to build community and give more support. However, that means teaching less curriculum. Even the proposed math/sci idea by Jack is essentially one day a week of content learning and another of content practice. I hear in the messages two tones: one of excitement for new strategies and openness to explore what remote learning could be and another focused on school rankings and standings.
We have to acknowledge that with more depth into a topic and exploration, there comes a trade off of a lack of breadth. Are parents okay with covering less content? With trusting teachers to know what is necessary vs what isn’t? Or will that become an issue? Remember we can’t be creative, do projects, help build community, care about the social emotional wellbeing of our students, teach critical thinking, and teach equity and anti racism all at the same time while meeting 2-3 times a week without giving up some content.
My hope is that parents will see the benefit outweighs the cost, if you will. But I’m genuinely interested given the tone of the comments section.
@Amanda,
I’m really curious to know how much of the scheduling delay is because the city is negotiating with NTA over details. I’ve reviewed the NTA’s submissions and I strongly suspect that classes, start times, end times and Wednesday’s are all within the purview of what the NTA believes (not expressing an opinion here) … is subject to collective bargaining.
The school committee can’t comment but if you can shed any light that would be illuminating.
@lisap I would love to say I know ANYTHING, but I don’t. Just like the school committee, the NTA bargaining committee can’t comment nor do they communicate well with their members about what they’re trying to get. I know there is a concern about the length of time students are spending on zoom and also how to make sure to incorporate more “office hours” or support time into the schedule. I do not know if that is what anyone is bargaining for though. I do know that they’ve expressed an understanding that at this point, due to the last minute decisions made by SC/NPS, that they’ve been put in a position where asking for major overhauls is no longer on the board or productive, such as start and end times (though I don’t really think this was ever a major issue).
I suspect that there may also be pushback from some parents and educators at the elementary level given that many rooms do not have adequate ventilation yet and the concern around allowing kids and teachers into those spaces against DESE and CDC regulations. (I believe the head of building services said that not everything was ready to go yet and some things were still backordered.)
Unrelated to what is actually being bargained, but related to the schedule, I can’t imagine that the NPS schedule is the final version. The one that NPS released has some days with 4 blocks of 90 minutes (6 hours total), which is exactly as long as a school day (9:15-3:15, keeping in mind 3:15-3:55 is extracurricular time). That means there is no transition period between classes and no lunch built in, which obviously needs to be corrected.
I’d also love to see 75 or 80 minute blocks (we’ve been hearing from 5-6 different students each day this week during our meetings and overwhelmingly we are hearing that 90 minutes is too long even with activities and breaks) and I’d love to see Wednesdays used for office hours, small group meetings, and maybe more creative things where kids can connect with each other and us.
Just like the kids and you as parents, teachers’ anxiety is ratcheting up as we wait to know the schedule and the time ticks down… (sorry for rambling…again)
NPS is failing its high school students. Newton needs a plan to open its high schools this year. All remote all year does not work.
Here’s a “little” fact that NPS didn’t discuss or mention to parents, but is buried in the FAQ. Because of distance learning, HS students cannot take more than twenty eight credits.
What does that mean? A student who is taking even a couple of honors class will not be able to participate in music (or fill in the blank off an important class that you would consider more than just an elective). My daughter is a junior an has been in honors symphony band since 9th grade. She practices nearly ever day. She takes private lessons. She is an accomplished musician. Her parents have invested a considerable amount of money buying her a quality instrument an paying for private lessons. But… because she is taking four honors class she is over the twenty eight credit limit and can longer be enrolled in the symphonic band. Now she can drop all her honors classes and enroll in symphonic band, but of course that would not be at the honors level either
NPS is truly failing our students. Having distance learning for a full academic year without any plan for in-person learning is bad enough, not allowing kids to continue their musical education is unforgivable. (Oh-to be fair-she did get wind ensemble which met twice a week for an hour last year. I am at wit’s end about what we as parents can do.