Classroom Connection

KIPP Academies- A Tale of "Outliers"

  

1. KIPP students designing a school mascot bracelet using Inventor 

2. Student catapult design for the 2009 Tech Challenge

3. KIPP student's work on designing a community skate park

    I recently found myself unable to put down Malcolm Gladwell’s new book “Outliers, the Story of Success”. Outliers, as Gladwell suggests, are often viewed as those rare individuals who, because of some magical set of conditions are able to achieve enormous success where many others either meet with failure or at best achieve mediocrity. By digging into real life stories- some about our popular success stories and many about seemingly “ordinary” people, the author ultimately makes the argument that while chance and “magical circumstances” do play a role in building success, there are other factors related to persistence and community support that can turn the tide for people, diverting them from a path towards failure to a trajectory of personal and professional success.
     As I turned to page 250, my attention was riveted by what the author had to say about KIPP Academy programs. While I don’t want to give away the story, I did find a great deal of inspiration and hope in this section. Hope, based on the fact that the KIPP programs (along with many emerging innovative educational programs) have demonstrated that despite the challenges students may inherit, schools (leaders, staff and community), when willing to break from tradition and engage students in new ways can have a profound impact on nurturing success.
     When in 2007 Autodesk teamed up with Kipp Summit Academy in San Lorenzo, CA they were helping to create the sorts of conditions that Gladwell identifies as crucial for success. Using Autodesk Inventor software, Kipp staff members have created opportunities for students to become real world problem solvers with many of their efforts aimed at giving back to the community.  The academic knowledge, technical skills and relationships derived from these school-community efforts are pivotal in helping students find their own path to success.

Six A's

  

So, here’s my confession… I’ve been so wrapped up in my dissertation studies on project based learning that I’ve missed several opportunities for postings. But the time I’ve spent reading, interviewing students and teachers at High Tech High San Diego, writing and re-writing has given me lots to share in this blog. So let’s start off this week with another entry about the KIPP Summit Academy,San Lorenzo, CA. This school was the recipient of a gift from Autodesk and among the many projects students have worked on this year is the TECH challenge presented by the San Jose Tech museum. In sending me some of her documentation on their entry, KIPP teacher Sylvia Gonzales included this note: “I have found that there are no limitations on what our students can create in Autodesk.  They always seem to go beyond the module or lesson to create their own designs.  At times, when they come up with an idea and I cannot show them how to do what they want – they experiment and that is where the real learning takes place”.  What struck me was her use of the term “real learning”.  What was she getting at- how does this learning different than other types of learning?  I’ll be relying to her e-mail with a suggestion that she take a look at a book titled “Real Learning- Real Work" by Adria Steinberg. The author suggests that the use of projects as a classroom pedagogy integrates what she coined as the “Six A’s- Authenticity, Academic Rigor, Applied Learning, Active Exploration, Adult Relationships, and  Assessment Practices.

If you go to the 2009 Tech challenge on the Web, you’ll get a sense of how the projects that the KIPP students worked on integrate the six A’s.  As noted on the site this challenge involved developing a device that can deliver a payload of up to 6 geological instruments (6 ping pong balls) to the top of the volcano in 3 minutes. The volcano will be 10 ft high and you must launch your device 20 ft away from the volcano. Read about the challenge and see where the A’s come into play.  In talking and reading about all of the problems inherent in our current educational system I can’t help but think that paying closer attention to how this configuration of A’s might steer us in the right direction for true educational reform.