The Institute for Collaborative Education

This week I had the great experience of visiting the Institute for Collaborative Education in New York City and WOW did they ever live up to their name! The school is made up of 6th-12th graders.

In the morning I attended a town meeting that was 100% student led. Students that are interested in leading the town meeting take a class in which they work on organizing and planning the town meetings. The town meeting is held once a week and the entire school attends. These students set up and take down all of the audio and technology equipment needed for the meeting as well. The town meeting consisted of announcements, students of the week, student created videos, and a live dance performance.

For the announcements the student MC said that anyone who had an announcement could line up behind the microphone and take their turn making an announcement. There was a whole range of announcements from a sixth grade student who introduced the other members of his band, to a woman promoting Vibe a hip hop vocal group for girls, to an upcoming baseball game in Central park, to the Spanish teacher asking others to come out and support students doing an oral presentation in Spanish afterschool. A parent volunteer who sat next to me busily typed up all the announcements as they were being made and uploaded them to the school website http://www.iceschool.net/group_profile_view.aspx?id=acc7e770-f6af-4ea9-9ea0-d874d0ffc45a.

The teachers picked a boy student and a girl student of the week. Teachers and councilors came up to the microphone and made comments about why they were chosen. The boy chosen for the week was a eighth grade student. When he was announced the entire eighth grade cheered. His Spanish teacher commented described how Spanish was difficult for him and how he started a study group of other students struggling with Spanish to help one another.

The most interesting part of the meeting for me was the student created videos. The school had received a grant that allowed them to purchase some video equipment. Any student that wants to create a video of one minute or less can email it to the assistant principal, Brett Schneider, who then reviews them and puts them on an external hard drive. Videos tended to be sort of public service announcements. For example two sixth grade boys made a video about how not to loose things. The older the students were that made the movies, the more technical and sophisticated they became and some of them had some real professional elements in them. A lot of them also had to do with academics. For example, a video might be Behind the Scenes in Room 581. The video had pop music and camera footage of students working on a roller-coaster experiment. When students saw themselves or their friends they cheered. It was really neat to see that students valued academics and chose to make movies about this. So often school assemblies seem to have a strong emphasis on sports, but this town meeting had a lot of tie-ins to what is happening instructionally in the school. It was also nice to see how much the older students included the middle school students and supported them in their efforts to be involved in the town meeting. As one of the girls doing the MC for the meeting said, “We are a family”.

The school has no technology coordinator. While the assistant principal acknowledged that this can sometimes be a frustration, I think it speaks to the fact that if you give students access to technology they will find a way to use it. So often I think schools and teachers avoid doing these types of projects because they themselves do not feel comfortable with the technology. Following the town meeting I went with the assistant principal to meet two teachers for lunch who wanted to incorporate some video into a social justice project they were doing using footage from a recent field trip to Washington DC that the students had taken. It was obvious that the teachers had never made a movie themselves before, but they didn’t let them stop them. Instead they asked the assistant principal to come in and team teach with their classes and show them how to do video editing. The assistant principal agreed to do this and to create some tip sheets that the students and teachers could use to help them as well. I think the collaborative planning that this group was doing reflects my favorite quote from AERA “The kind of community we set out to design and engineer is a reflection of the environments we set up for ourselves”- Leslie Rupert.

One of the 21st Century Skills our students need to succeed in thrive in a new economy is collaboration. The Institute for Collaborative Education is fully realizing this in their day-to-day instructional practices. How well is your organization or school realizing this goal?