This story begins with Alexis, a fiery tenth-grader who ranks among the most truculent students I encountered during the four years that I spent teaching. Each morning during the winter of 2008, Alexis would flounce into class and defiantly put her head down on her desk. I tried encouraging her, cajoling her, and threatening her, to no avail: it seemed that she just didn’t care about school.
One morning I decided to try a different tack. I had bumped into Alexis a number of times while at the local supermarket, where she worked as a cashier, so I brought up her job. “Alexis, I know that you’re capable of discipline and excellent work because I’ve seen how hard you work at the store,” I said. “You just need to pretend that you’re there.”
Alexis looked at me with a mixture of amusement and indignance. “Ms. Fine,” she said, pausing for effect, “I don’t like playing pretend.”
The interaction threw me into an existential funk. Alexis was playing her usual defiance card, but it struck me that on some level she was also speaking truth to power. Is that what schools ask of students: to play pretend? Whose fault is it that the connection between school and the outside world isn’t clear for kids like Alexis? We educators talk endlessly about crafting “authentic” academic tasks, but have we thought enough about what this actually means?
These questions are deeply important to Dennis Littky and Elliot Washor, two educators who joined forces in 1994 to found the school-design nonprofit known as Big Picture Learning. Littky and Washor met thirty-seven years ago as college students and lived parallel but separate professional lives until they together were given the opportunity by the state of Rhode Island to open an alternative public high school in Providence. There, they strove to build a model that realized their shared beliefs about education: first, that schools should stay small; second, that learning should be highly individualized; and third, that traditional schools play far too much pretend.
“I have always thought it’s hysterical that inside the school building we work really hard to make lessons that look and feel real, when all the while, the real world is going on outside – and it’s filled with history, social issues, work issues, scientific exploration, math, writing, technology, and everything else,” Littky writes in his book, The Big Picture: Education Is Everybody’s Business. “Why don’t we just step back outside?”
Accordingly, the Big Picture Learning design provides a model for high schools in which students pursue “real work” both inside and outside the classroom. During their first months at the school, freshmen undergo training to prepare them for the rigors of working in the professional world, learning everything from telephone etiquette to resumé-writing. At the same time, with the guidance of their home advisor – a teacher who “loops” with one group of students for all four years of high school – they reflect on their skills and professional aspirations.
By the end of the term most students are ready to get to work. Literally. They go through the interview process with one or more of the school’s many local businesses partners until they land an internship position to which they report twice a week during the schoolday. Teachers spend these days tutoring students who are between internships and doing site visits so that they can help their advisees prepare rigorous projects to present back at school. Some students change internships every few months, exploring different careers and developing a range of professional skills; some find a niche where they stay for all four years of high school.
I was lucky enough to see one of Big Picture Learning’s 60-odd schools in action last week. The 200-student San Diego Met occupies a building on the verdant campus of Mesa community college, east of the city center. It was Wednesday and students were at work in their classes, looking for all intents and purposes like any group of urban public school students. When I got the chance to talk to a handful them individually, they were poised, talkative, and – yes – genuinely enthusiastic about their school experience.
“It used to be like I was a slacker and I didn’t care about anything…but this school helped me change from a teenager into an adult,” one student told me with a wry grin. He explained that he moved from interning in the media center of a college library to working as a cameraman for a local television channel. Another student, a senior, described how her four-year-long internship at a marine biology research organization had helped her to hone her career-goals and to build expertise. “I’m going to go to college for marine biology, but I feel like I’m way ahead because I spent all that time learning how to do it,” she said.
The mantra of “real work” extends to Big Picture classrooms, too. “The work that is done in schools looks like real work, but is not real enough,” Littky writes. He goes on to compare two social studies units – one designed around elections, and the other around travel. In the first unit, students learned about the electoral process and got involved in a local election by holding a voter registration drive. In the second, students planned a trip to a foreign country by doing research and creating a brochure. Both units were rigorous, standards-aligned, and hands-on, but they had an important difference: authenticity. In the first unit, learning led up to a community-based project; in the second, kids planned a trip that they were never going to take.
Which unit resulted in high engagement and enduring understandings? Take a wild guess.
The design that Littky and Washor came up with is not only innovative but also successful. Big Picture Learning schools have strong overall standardized test scores and boast that 92 percent of their entering freshmen graduate as seniors. 95 percent of these graduates are accepted into college, and one of the organization’s recent initiatives involves supporting all graduates through their transition to college and beyond. (This year, in partnership with the Roger Williams University, the Rhode Island Met is even piloting its own internship-based college program.)
Those unfamiliar with the Big Picture Learning schools might assume that their success comes from having a large number of high-capacity students. They would be right – except that the students who enter Big Picture Learning schools often begin as some of the most at-risk and unconventional kids out there. “Our space is the one with the most marginalized kids,” said Washor in a recent interview. “The point is that we think they can be successful if they’re given a chance. We don’t want to dead-end anybody.”
I came face-to-face with evidence of Washor’s pronouncement during the middle of my day at the San Diego Met, when a recent graduate stopped by to say hello to the principal. I asked him about his experience at the school and he laughed. “That place transformed me, dude,” he said. He described how as a ninth-grader he had no ambition and used to come to school “all messed up,” until his advisor finally intervened. “She just kept putting AA flyers on my desk. Finally, she got through to me, and four years later I’m in college.”
It was during this conversation that I finally realized what had been at the back of my mind all morning: the Big Picture Learning model is taking kids like Alexis and helping them to find purpose and meaning. It is incredibly important work, and even as I marveled at it, I thought with a tinge of regret about the well-intentioned but hopelessly conventional school where I spent the last four years.
What if I had helped Alexis become a better reader and writer by encouraging her to explore her unique interests, rather than by muscling her through a grade-wide curriculum? What if her time in school had felt more connected and relevant to her evolving identity? Would she still have been so defiant and unengaged?
The answer, I believe, comes straight from Littky: “When it’s real work, kids do it, no matter the subject.”
Sarah Fine spent four years working as a teacher, department chair, and instructional coach at a charter high school in Washington, D.C. Her work has appeared most recently in The Washington Post.
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