Matt and I have led some standards-based grading workshops the past few summers for teachers and administrators. Without fail, we end up spending time on the same mental roadblock from at least some of the educators in the workshop:
If we don’t ___ , we won’t be preparing students for college.
Fill in that blank with nearly anything you can think of.
- Take off for late work
- Give zeroes
- Grade homework
You get the idea. Matt and I came up with a rebuttal for that this year that helped them see the absurdity of taking one tiny aspect of high school life and extrapolating it out to “preparing them for college.” When this conversation inevitably came up, we said, “OK. Let’s prepare them for college, then. Starting their freshman year of high school, we’ll move them all into apartments and they can live on their own. Right?”
We talked about other aspects of college life that we aren’t so apt to bring down to high school. The conversation became fun and nostalgic and by the end there was a sense of, “All right , we get it. Maybe we’re holding onto some things for ourselves and not in the name of preparation.”
I had this thought about preparing our students for college pop into my mind the other day. This time it was in the context of the new course I’m teaching this year. I haven’t written about it, so here’s the gist:
I have a group of 17 juniors and seniors each day from noon to two-thirty in the afternoon. We don’t meet at Waukee high school. I don’t even have a classroom at the high school. Instead, we meet in downtown Des Moines in a space inside the DLR Group, an architecture and engineering firm. The students act as consultants doing work for local businesses in marketing, media production, and graphic design. They work next to other professionals all afternoon long. So far this semester, they’ve worked with Unplugged Adventures (a single-owner adventure race business), the Board of Educational Examiners, the Des Moines Social Club, and many others. They’ve set up job shadows with corporations such as Meredith Corp. as well as the Iowa Cubs. They’ve created personal brands. They set up meetings with their clients. They learn their clients’ needs. They communicate with their clients frequently to gain feedback on the iterations of their projects. My role is that of manager. I keep up to date with their projects and clients. I bring in new clients when necessary. I reflect with them. I help them set growth goals. The two-and-a-half hours they have each day are theirs. We eat lunch together at noon, then go through a daily standup where we each share what we worked on yesterday, what we’re working on today, and any roadblocks we foresee. When a project calls for certain skills, they either learn them or pull a peer onto the project with the skills. They manage their time. They set deadlines with clients. They solicit and use feedback. They dress professionally every day. They communicate with me and keep our shared calendar updated.
We had representatives of a community and school district visit us the the other week to see the students in action. Inevitably questions from the traditional classroom came up. Grading, attendance, that kind of stuff. When that thought – Are they wondering about the whole “preparing them for college” thing? – crept into my mind again, I thought, What truly is unique about college?
Here’s what I think it is:
Up to that point in our lives, college is simultaneously the most freedom we’ve ever had and the most responsibility we’ve ever had.
So, are we preparing them for college?