Diigo Bookmarks (weekly)

• How Intrinsic Schools is Breaking the Laws of School Innovation | EdSurge News

  similar to alliance's newest model (with the 'commons') for high school

  tags: innovation high school personalized learning blogpost

  • personalized learning model
  • Intrinsic’s “pods” are designed so students intuitively use different areas of the learning environment for teacher-led instruction, peer-to-peer learning and independent work.
  • Pods serve 60 students and are staffed by three adults, two core subject teachers and a special education or assistant teacher.
  • Each area of the pod is named and uses visible landmarks for easy student navigation.
  • allows me to do small group instruction or one-on-one tutoring the majority of each day,”
  • students rotate through each space during the 90-minute English block, Ashley and her co-teacher Bryan Podell never teach more than 15 students at a time.
  • plan four or more literacy lessons, sometimes using different novels, that are tailored to the needs of each group
  • piloting a mastery-based classroom where students are learning six different levels of math ranging from Algebra to Pre-Calculus, reflecting the diverse academic needs of their students
  • The structure makes it difficult to revert back to the whole class approaches found in traditional classrooms.
  • co-teachers 90 minutes of common planning time every day so teaching teams can thoughtfully design the flow of student activities across the different pod spaces
  • Paradoxically, adopting more structures and systems in its second year resulted in more innovation, not less
  • changing everything means changing nothing
  • structure unlocked innovation. These initiatives lie in stark contrast to Intrinsic’s earlier innovation attempts where too much complexity meant defaulting back to traditional structures and approaches.
  • beginning work on second-order innovations
  • creating a “genius hour” to support more student choice and independence
  • building mobile data tools that teachers can use while commuting on the bus
  • strategically using adaptive software to further individualize learning
  • school innovation tends to go down once students start showing up for class
  • Intrinsic has a one-to-one Chromebook implementation and uses Hapara for course management and Securly for content filtering. Grade level teams choose online content but popular math software includes Think Through Math, ST Math, Khan Academy and IXL. ThinkCERCA, NoRedInk and Reading Plus are the primary literacy programs. Intrinsic builds custom data dashboards for its teachers using the Jasper programming language and pulls data from Illuminate Education, its student information system.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.