We Learn - A Creative and Stylish Group

I wish I could remember names. Don't they look lovely? She is a magazine. He is a video.

The Colab experience

Everyone here is hard at work. I love how pensive everyone looks and how everyone is doing things individually toward a common purpose. I love it when my class looks like this.

We Learn and Synchronicity

I thought it was really bizarre how in sync everyone seemed to be in the COLABS at Big Ideas this year. We all seemed to have this idea in our brains that students could use the internet to direct their own learning and keep track of the path they have been on as learners. I love the idea. Now the only thing I have is whatever I save in some more or less organized fashion (mostly less) and my browser history. So we all think and work on this and everyone in our group is on board and I can't see in their brains but it sure seems like we are on the same page. Last year I liked my group but we were all over the place. So we come up with this idea that a program or computer system or app should be created that archives your learning experiences, that directs you, and helps connect you with other learners. It was very cool. The next thing you know there is Danny Hilis giving this beautiful lecture on this learning map (it didn't have the social component but it had everything else). It was so close to what we had been describing in our meeting. That was just amazing. Humans really do have a kind of hive mind. WE can cal it zeitgeist but we do have a sort of internalized vision and drive or instinct that we share that directs the future and builds on our past culture. I loved the beauty of his map and the fact that he had professional artists involved the most embarrassing part of the colab was when I tried to draw something to illustrate my idea. I also tried to show it in a physical way and that was also embarrassing.

Ripple Effect of Big Ideas

Both this year and last what I have taken to heart from Big Ideas is that it is not okay for kids to be bored out of their skulls at school. I can actually remember being so bored in high school that I thought you really could just die from boredom. We give lip service to multiple intelligences, differing learning styles, and blooms taxonomy and then everyone just goes right on lecturing and giving reading and writing assignments and that's it. I love being at Big Ideas because people are looking at the fact that the world has changed, that technology exists and it has the power to make education more just globally. Why we still have textbooks is beyond me. I would love to work with a group of people and create an textbook for English that only used sources in the public domain. I have textbooks in my class so big that kids will never take them home. The thing is enormous, costs a fortune and is filled with excerpts from literature available for free on Gutenberg. How stupid.

Return to the Big Ideas Blog

I actually created a new Big Ideas Blog but I wasn't very happy with it and no one visited it so it died a short painless death. I thought I would recreate myself and disassociate myself from this old blog but I'm back. I got a note a from Megan Simmons, who I like and appreciate, saying where are the pictures, the videos, the blogs from Big Ideas. So I am going back in time. The year ended with my commuter stolen and my lovely and expensive orange harddrive is corrupted somehow so that whole time machine process didn't work. I wanted to abandon this blog because I thought it got depressing and here I go. Final thought on the 2010 Big Ideas, it was super inspiring and had a huge effect on me but a lot of things I tried to do didn't work out. I took a lot of great things from it however. I changed schools and I am not on any committees. Now I implement things in my classroom and rely on a sort of low key approach and it is actually working. Anyway, next blog returns to what happened this year.

A more introspective Big Ideas

I really meant to blog during the fest this year and record impressions as they occurred but it didn’t happen. My desire to observe and participate won over my need to document. This year’s fest was more introspective for me than last year's. Last year almost every speaker made me think “Oh I want try that” or “what a great idea, let’s do that”. This year it all was a bit vague. I really love Bill Ayers. I love what he says. I love his point of view and I also love how sort of twinkly he is. I know that sounds ridiculous but he truly is charismatic. The advice to pay attention, be astonished, and do something was a bit vague. I guess it is better than to observe, be pissed off, complain and alienate everyone. I have to say, though, his speech did make me think that and just thinking about it was helpful.

Last year I really tried to implement ideas, some successfully and most not. I realized that my method of being on every committee and arguing my point was seriously not effective.

First day big ideas 2011

Big ideas is on. . Yesterday was great. Met a ton of interesting people. I thought of a friend of mine who wants to be a science educator outside of the classroom. Sometimes it really does seem like sitting in the classroom is part of the problem. We did an exercise where people wrote down a moment as a learner, any time at all in their lives, that had a big impact on them, and for many people it wasnt at school. It might have been running around an estuary, building something with friends, or making a discovery on your own. Maybe as teachers we could find a way to facilitate and then step back.mthe classroom set up itself isn’t so conducive

war on teachers is getting me down

I wanted to write an entry because it has been a while but I am finding it hard this week to be positive. The earthquake and its aftermath, the continuing and escalating war, the siege on teachers and public employees, all seem very close to home. I attended some rallies in support of Wisconsin and that was heartening (there were a lot of people and many moving speeches) and depressing at the same time. I can't imagine anyone choosing to become a teacher right now. I read that article in AFT by Paul Karrer, Castroville Teacher's Reality Letter to President Obama. I must really be feeling sorry for myself because it made me cry. I'll see if I can put a link to the letter on this page but you can google AFT and the title of the article and it will come up.

Our school is meant to be run by a teacher collaborative but egos aren't being checked at the door. I'm doing some soul searching myself and trying to refrain from blurting out what ever good (according to me) idea I have. I don't mean it to seem like oneupsmanship so I'm trying to watch it. We (myself and a couple of colleagues) are picking up some hostility from coworkers. We had an endless meeting last night where nothing at all was accomplished. Someone told me once that there are people who don't want success but we have no idea what to do. I believe in compassion and I think we are compassionate but how do we move beyond this? I'm staying positive and friendly but someone actually complained that I was happy. Just writing that just made me laugh and feel better.

On the upside, I have convinced the admin to get class sets of iPads and more mac carts, and even a class set of Ipods so that students can easily do research. Everyone is into the groups of four idea. It fits with SIDAE (I'd write what the acronym stands for but I can never remember. I worked first on teaching the students how to write research papers in collaboration with the science teachers and now we are beginning to do research for their persuasive essays and speeches. My class was visited by the district supervisor and luckily the little groups were all functioning and working well. I have some classes that function well and others that don't, so I can't make any sweeping generalizations about the success of the group work. I have 40 or close to 40 students in my classes. The noise level during group work can be pretty high. Next year class sizes are supposed to rise. Hard to imagine.

Other Big Ideas - Los Angeles Town Hall STEAM Conf.

It wasn't quite the Big Ideas Festival but the Los Townhall Steam Conference was full of interesting people. Los Angeles Townhall put on a STEAM conference, the A wa stuck in to include arts in the science, technology, engineering, math mix.

There were about 30 speakers in about 6 moderated discussions with some audience response over an afternoon/evening and a day. There were none of the collaborative laboratories that we held at Big Ideas Festivals. Not having the COLAB made me see the importance of them. It's not enough just to hear people speak you need to use what you hear to collaborate on problem solving.

We did have the opportunity to talk to people though. The science teacher (from my school) and I met Tara Chklovski, her group is called Iridescent Learning. Their mission is to bring the beautiful side of science to students. They work closely with students and their parents. We hope we can begin working together on a project. They have a group of mentor engineers that are able to communicate to students. One of the things the students can do is design t-shirts that explain scientific concepts with diagrams. In English, we will design the research project, work in science to develop their question and do the reasearch and then we will work with Iridescent to develop their understanding of the scientific question, understand applications and create the t-shirt. And their parents will be there as well. Or somehting like that, it's still early.

I also met a woman who works at the Fashion Design Institute and talked to her about the t-shirt project and she is going to arrange a field trip to a large (hip) apparel manufacturer and the students will see the manufacturing end of the t-shirt production.

The conference gave us lots of ideas. The big bummer (it was so depressing) was the speech from Anthony Wilder Miller, Deputy Secretary of the US Dept. of Education. What a clueless politician! His big idea is that what we need are higher standards and longer days, shorter vacations. Let's do what isn't working for longer!

One woman came up and said, she didn't mind having standards but it wasn't realistic. She used the analogy of going up to a buffet table and putting so many things on the plate that food was falling off. The problem isn't with the height of the standards (make them as high as you want) but with the sheer number.

And what is falling off the plate is science, history, all the arts, and all the language arts strands that aren't reading. With such high stake testing, not everyone feels they can afford to concentrate on oral language skills (very important life skill) because they aren't tested.

Kids come out of school without basic skills because they have just spent years sitting on their bottoms, bored out of their minds, uninterested and unable to see the point. My students go in to large urban high schools with a drop out rate of almost 60%. Teachers go in an at least hour early and we mostly tutor for an hour (at least) after school. We could spend the night and it wouldn't solve the problem.

If you took away the vacations of middle school teachers, I think they would go insane. No one could do the job without a break.

Change isn't Easy

Two steps forward and then it isn't really two steps back, it is more like we never moved. Earlier I said I was really excited because we were looking at new models for intervention, inspired by School of One (individualized instruction catering to different learners), The Hole in the Wall Project (peer led learning using technology). Well, it looks like our intervention will be using worksheets that are basically test prep.

We had also decided that community building among the staff was a priority but now it seems it isn't, (I really think it should be) because we are doing 6 hours of SIDAE training instead that will be led by someone from the district. Hopefully it will be interactive. It could build community if it includes role playing... We'll see.

We had also decided that whole staff would read the same book on having a productive work place, where people get along and then that didn't happen either. We are no longer reading a book together. Our last meeting was a disaster. At the rate we are going, we will need a professional mediator. We are a small school, we need to find a way to agree and move forward. We are supposed to help students learn to listen and respond to each other. How can we teach what we can't practice?

Unless we have the community building part down I don't see how we can move forward to really be a school that lives up to its vision of a collaborative teaching model that is interdisciplinary, project based, and student centered.

Making Schools Safe

Two days after my last blog, about addressing bullying, there were two shootings within a couple of miles of my middle school. One student had a gun in his backpack and it went off and shot a boy through the neck, that same bullet hit a girl in the temple. I think that yesterday she opened her eyes for the first time. In addition, one of my students died of meningitis. Her funeral was last Sunday. Everyone is sad and everyone is concerned.

Some teachers were concerned about parent reaction to the fact that we now have a Gay Straight Alliance chapter at our school but I'm not. Some students are gay, some students are accused of being gay, students are harassed. This group of students, gay and straight, are willing to step up and take a stand against bullying and intolerance and I hope the school will do everything to support them. We can hold discussions with parents and hear their concerns but the GSA will remain at our school.

Having an Impact

At the conference, one of the questions was how do we help teachers have a greater impact on students. The three areas we looked at were building community, having a more student centered curriculum that includes technology, and imagining a different, and more flexible, learning environment.

When we speak of community, we turn to issues of trust and safety. There aren't a lot of mental health resources available in our society and sometimes issues seem way bigger than our ability as individuals to deal with them but you have to start somewhere. Bullying is a real problem. It is serious and awful and if I described recent incidents, you would think I was exaggerating. Every now and then something is on the news and we are all horrified but it isn't happening now and then, it's happening all the time.

My advisory class discussed bullying and they decided to form a group at our school "We are All Against Bullying". The students want to create a website with interviews, information, and surveys. They want to start a campaign. They are really into the idea of the raising money but they don't know what they need the money for. It makes me laugh but it gets to the heart of the matter in education: the students want to do things; they want to create (even if it just a cake).

After the meeting, a couple of students came to speak to me. They said they weren't comfortable bringing it up but could we create a Gay Straight Alliance at the school and have that be part of our anti-bullying efforts. They said there are a lot of gay students at the school but they don't feel safe.

The next advisory period I asked if students wanted to specifically link issues surrounding sexual orientation to bullying. The first response was that we don't have any gay students at the school but someone said maybe that wasn't the issue because a lot of students accused of being gay weren't. The question was asked if you had a friend who told you they were gay would you still be their friend. Everyone said they would but some people didn't look too sure. It was a great discussion. Someone brought up the Gay Straight Alliance and they all agreed it would be powerful if we publicly stated we were not in favor of using gay slurs and were not homophobic. I think they might be a little nervous but everyone agreed to be part of this group. My advisory has 21 students.

Afterward I was in the hallway and told a teacher who is the webmaster that I needed a page on the school website for our Gay Straight Alliance. She was with some visitors. The visitor overheard and came to see me later, it turns out that they are members of the Gay Straight Alliance from the nearby high school. They want to come and talk to my advisory next Tuesday. A community can start to build very quickly it seems.

I registered our school with the national group of the Gay Straight Alliance. I ordered material about bullying.

While I was on the site I also ordered material about the holocaust from Tolerance.org. I think we will broaden our outlook and include some history. It looks like we will get buses to visit a new holocaust museum in Los Angeles for all the 8th graders. We have other resources in Los Angeles and community members willing to help so we should be able link our efforts to stop bullying in our schools to civil rights. I can't believe this all came together in two days (and it seems a great way to celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr.)

During the next meeting of our teachers, I'll present these developments. Hopefully everyone will be interested.

Implementing Big Ideas

I am going back to school tomorrow after the winter break and it looks like ideas inspired by the conference will be implemented. We had an Instructional Committee meeting over the break. 5 teachers and the principal attended. All teachers were invited and we get paid but I guess it was difficult to come in during the break. One of the teachers said afterward that she thought it was amazing that teachers (with the principal) were actually developing our professional development together.

One thing that stayed with me from the conference was when Alesha Daughtry said that sometimes people don't know they can just discuss issues and change direction. Sometimes teachers just expect to hear "no" or not to be heard at all so they just vent to each other instead of trying to institute change or to come to some kind of compromise.

We went over what we thought were the three big areas for PD to always revolve around and these were: building community among the teachers and staff, helping all students succeed, developing curriculum specific to our school's vision. "Helping all students succeed" sounds like the task of any school but we need to look specifically at the students in our school who are not successful and maybe haven't been for many years. Our students go into large urban high schools with probably some of the highest rates of drop out in the country.

So we discussed new models for remediation, using technology, some ideas from Hole in the Wall were discussed (groups of four using an ipad), using ideas from School of One
(individualized remediation that used different modalities).

We are going to have a tech advisor from the district come in and do a workshop with all the teachers on using iPADS. We are using a model for the workshops that are project based and have very little lecture. Not everyone is comfortable with this but it is supposed to be at the core of our school endeavor (collaborative, project based instruction that offers and opportunity to both learn and show understanding using different modalities) so we need to do it anyway.

We divided our professional development into sections:

1 - all reading the same book together ( a book about effective workplaces and how to talk to each other) and we will set aside some PD every week to discuss the book.

2. Learning new technology together (in groups of 4) with some activity (we thought we would combine VoiceThread with the bookclub for the first tech pd).

3. Returning always to our school's vision and linking this to ways to help all students achieve success (we haven't yet developed this plan - this will be a work in progress but included interdisciplinary projects).

I'm uploading some of the picture I took during the conference that were topic the labs worked on because I think they are relevant to our professional development.

Expanding the School Community

Inspired by the principal from Ocoee Florida who showed that "Gotta Read" video, I started the Got To Read campaign. I couldn't call it "Gotta" as I work too hard with the students to get them to stop writing "gotta, wanna, gonna". Everyone will still call it Gotta Read. I was a little taken back when I realized I'm jumping on a bandwagon that has been on Oprah. Oh well... Anyway this project will help me in a number of ways connecting with local businesses and getting kids to read. We are going to get businesses and community members around our school to support it. We are having the students keep booklogs that include word counts. Prizes will be given at half a million and a million words. We are going to make posters that describe the project and post them in local business naming the business as a supporter. The businesses will make donations, gift certificates for prizes, or items, what ever they can. So we are bringing businesses into our school community.

The Harry Potter books a while ago made every kid want to read books with supernatural elements but now these Eclipse books have all the girls wanting romantic literature. I could only think of the Bronte sisters and Jane Austen. I need to do some research on current tween romantic lit.

One of the issues with the students is how little they read, so maybe this will get them to read a little more. Those students who do read will read even more. They started the day we gave them the book logs. I took all the students to the library and bet some will have 500,000 words by the time we get back from vacation. Some teachers had issues with the fact that we aren't requiring proof and there is no book report due. The California Framework states:

…A variety of methods are available to assess reading done outside the classroom, including student-maintained reading logs and book reports in various formats (Snow 2002). According to the standard, the instruction should be focused on the reading itself rather than on the final report on reading.
Independent reading significantly improves a student’s reading comprehension and vocabulary and increases familiarity with models of good writing and conventions of writing and spelling. It also serves an important affective purpose; that is, to develop a lifelong appreciation for reading for pleasure and information. Recent research indicates that the volume of reading also affects general cognitive development.”

Asking Students About Teachers

During the conference there was a lot of videos shown where students talk about what they like about different teachers and different schools. I wrote down one quote. "A good teacher makes me feel confident." I thought that during advisory I would pose the question: "What do you think makes a good teacher?" to the students and have them respond using iMOVIE. I wonder if some other teachers could do it as well. We could edit responses together into a short clip and maybe view and discuss it during a PD.


At the fest, we interviewed a high school student. We asked her what she enjoyed about school, what made school difficult, her favorite subjects, etc. It turned out that all her classes had the teacher lecturing in front of the class except biology. During biology they sometimes worked in groups but even then the experiment was written out and they followed prescribed instructions. We were wanting all this information about whether she preferred to work certain ways (we came with our own ideas) but she could only reference what she knew. She liked test because she appreciated the quiet. This is true of many of my students as well. Lunch was her favorite part of the day though, from this you could possibly infer that she enjoyed socializing and maybe that should be including in learning. You think? It's hard not to feel defensive when your class is full of chattering students and someone walks in. Hey, some are on task. Maybe more than we think. Tomorrow I'll experiment with groups of four taking tests together. I'll just give one test per 4 people.

Making Connections and Using some Big Ideas

Continue to see connections everywhere. I'm writing pretty fast though and my husband, Jeff, remarked that for an English teacher my English is not so good (that's not the expression he used). I am like the kids here, skipping the revise step.

Anyway saw an amazing magic show last night that was a benefit for Theatre West. There were just a few kids in the audience (well we were all like kids watching this) but they were enthralled. Jeff said, isn't there some way you can teach Science and English using magic. These kids are hooked. Actually I'm sure someone has a curriculum linking magic to science - one act last night was a great lesson on centrifugal force. Rob Zabracky, the host, was this strange, enthralling character that I just loved.

Anyway at my school we are trying things out. There is a possiblity of getting IPADS or something similar so we can use the lesson from Hole in the Wall and have kids work in groups of four with the teacher stepping back. Both the science teacher and I did group work in our classrooms yesterday with groups of 4. I only have two computers in my room though, so students who needed to research sounded like they needed to use the bathroom. I kept hearing, "Hurry up I really need to use it."

Back at School

I came back inspired. I feel strongest about the lecture from Diego Navarro because he teaches the kids I have now 5 to 7 years later. He spoke to healing the injuries (I'm at the site where these injuries can easily occur). We have the kids wanting to go to college but there are a lot of obstacles and statistics are not encouraging. Of my students who do go to college only 30% can expect to be successful. The students I work with are so smart and capable yet so many are failing school. My hope is to help the students find ways to be successful and to support them in initiating their own learning. So between

A. Diego Navarro (finding ways to let these kids know how smart and capable they are and helping them succeed instead of failing them because they aren't working in class or doing the homework),

B. Sugata Mitra (I am determined to have 10 IPADs in my class so every block can work in groups of 4 to research at will, and on the fly, and of their own volition tapping into their own natural curiosity.)

C. Christopher Rush (Can we find a way to be flexible enough to let students not only learn in the way that suits them but also show mastery in a variety of ways? How can we do this logistically in a school with a student teacher ratio of 36 to one and few resources?)

D. Salman Khan - Can we integrate the use of his videos in order to enable students study the work without a teacher who is inadvertently or not, making them feel stupid? Can we create a flexible work space for students?

I had a field trip as soon I got back. We took all the 8th graders to see a play at a new performing arts high school. They had a wonderful time! The play was very long but they were a great audience. I think it is possible that most of the students had never been to a theatre production and one said (very excitedly), "This was better than any movie." The Crucible is perfect for middle school kids. Anyway I thought of Word Nik as one of the students described the production as being very commotional. The play had a lot of action in the aisles and it really was "commotional".

I just went into WordNik signed up and discovered a funny exchange about the word "commotional", a CNN reporter reporting live said the scene was very "commotional" the newscaster said back "Did you just say "commotional"? I tagged myself there as "middle school living language".

I'm going to to keep this blog up for a while as I continue to make connections between the fest and my own teaching.

I also want to try and find a video of that high school that did a kind of flashmob to support reading. I absolutely want to do a version of that at my school, for the same reason to support reading.

I'll continue to insert links to videos, articles, and blogs on all the people and projects mentioned above.

Meeting People From Everywhere

I just had lunch sitting next Nikos Palavitsinis from Athens. His organization is grnet.gr. It's all about bringing organic gardening to schools in Athens and it was all started inadvertently by a retired teacher who got a donkey and some chickens and kids started visiting his garden. We have a similar program in LA. WE need to get it our schools.

I wish I could bring Diego Navarro of Cabrillo College in Watsonville, to our school. He talked about working with young people who think they are stupid and can not learn because they continually failed in Middle School and High School, and even elementary school. He showed a short video that was really inspiring. We should watch this during a PD and think about ways we can help our students be successful.

It's been great getting all these different perspectives. I met another gentleman who is a director of a High School with an innovative curriculum and he s having a hard time trying to help teachers who keep falling back into the whole class lecture model. Sometime we feel administrators aren't supportive when we want to try new ideas but how can we learn to teach in a way that was different than we were taught.

Last night I met Liz Lian who has founded an organization that tries to empower parents to work with schools to transform them. HEr group is called empowered*parenting.

All of these people are working hard to create models of schools that support students emotionally, empower parents, create community connections, and provide for the different ways that students learn. We all pay lip service to emotional intelligences and Blooms taxonomy but we need to create support, change the architecture, use technology in a much smarter way.

How Can I Remember Everything?

I have to remind myself that all these people are available online and I will be able find them again or at least information about them. I feel this desire to remember everything I hear. I feel like I have this responsibility to bring everything I learn back. I have every intention of coming back next year, I just hope that someone else comes with me. I just think I would remember better if I had someone from the school to use as a sounding board and we could imagine how we could use some of these ideas, resources and people to help our school.

I just listened to Christopher Rush of School of One. This is a school in New York developed by a middle school science teacher who said that we are failing not because we aren’t great inspired teachers but that basically the job is impossible. He describes a typical class rooms containing a high level reader who is always truant, a disruptive students, a student who can only function when it is quiet and she is alone or with one other person, and so on. All different levels (varying by 5 grades levels although they are the same age) all different preferred ways of learning, different interests, He said a typical lesson might be teaching fractions, at the end half the students get and half don’t. Do you move on or not. Anyway they have created this amazing school that uses computer technology to move students around putting them in small groups, larger whole class type situations, one on one with a real tutor, on a computer with a virtual tutor depending on their learning style and the standard they are trying to master and they don’t move on till they have got it and the computer tries to aid them in trying to figure out different ways they might learn it and based on their experiences (kind of like Pandora) and guesses what might work best for them. It was really amazing. I would love to go to New York and see this school. Anyway I want to read all about this school it they every want to create a proptype in Los Angeles, I’m there.

FIRST DAY AT THE CONFERENCE

The first day at the conference was great. The drive here was beautiful as well. It is lovely to be next to the Pacific, even on a cold blustery day.

The conference has already been very helpful. I came here with specific personal and professional goals. One was to see a model of professional interaction that works. I am really happy to see that people can come together and address issues that matter with vigor and sincerity.

One of the first activities we took part in was to speak in groups of three about our own experiences as learners and tell each other stories about how we were affected by issues of cost, access, or quality. We each were to concentrate on just one of the three. We then had to condense or distill these three stories using just one to three words.

One of the people in my group of three was Alesha Daughtrey of the Center for Teacher Quality. I had a great talk with Alesha. I am at school that is brand new, we have some growing pains and she had some smart suggestions that include becoming friends with a school that is quite like my school (trying a integrated, project based curriculum that is based on a collaborative model) but is a few years farther along.

Later I brought up that my school is about to pay some teachers for extended hours for Saturday school for those students who scored below basic last year. This is a case where the students will have access, and cost isn't an issue but how do we assure quality? She wonders if more hours at school is the answer. If you have a student who isn't engaged during regular hours, are more hours at school going to help? Can we develop an innovative and engaging curriculum for after hours and Saturday and assess the value of this program?


I thought of this when Ashley Nand, a junior in High School spoke about Road Trip Nation and about how empowering and engaging it was to learn away from the classroom. The Road Trip Nation students interview people in their community.

Then Sugata Mitra spoke to and presented evidence of the natural curiosity and capability of students. As teachers we need to ask questions, step back, and have faith in our students. He was really wonderful and inspiring.

During dinner I met Jacob Lauser and Anteneh Hailu high school students who participate Roadtrip. Talking to them has made me want to bring this program to my students.

At dinner I also met Steve Rich of WAY Program. Way stands for Widening Advancements for Youth and they have a program for kids who aren't finding success in traditional high school. They provide access to teacher/mentors 24/7 and come to the students home and install an apple computer and internet. The students and teachers work together to design a program that is individualized, meets standards and is of interest to the student. If something traumatic happens in the student's life and they disengage, they won't be allowed to fall through the cracks. The teacher will continue to work with them till they are back on track. They get a regular diploma. The program has proven to be successful for many students (they have some incredible retention rate) and it is now funded by the state (Michigan).

I am one of those people who was saved in middle school by an innovative program. I was about to drop out when instead of being punished for truancy I was put in a very small alternative school that was big on student led experiential learning. Every single student in that program with me that year went on to the university. I know from experience that one size doesn't fit all.