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Four Essential Elements of School Design

Author(s): Kathy Simon

When we at the Coalition of Essential Schools (CES) talk about "school design," we refer not to the physical design of the school building (though that also deserves attention), but to decisions about all aspects of resource allocation, including management of time, staffing patterns, uses of space, course offerings, and the like. Even when mortar and bricks must remain in place, there is much room for innovation and improvement in these aspects of school design.

We know that there is no single blueprint for the design of a great school, because great schools respond to the particular contexts and needs of their communities. The research and experience of the Coalition demonstrates, however, that there are four elements that all excellent schools share and that are essential for making significant, lasting improvements in student achievement and in creating a nurturing school culture. This brief paper outlines the thinking underlying each of these essential elements, without detailing the many different strategies for implementing them. The four elements are as follows:

1. Courses and curriculum must be designed so that all students are required to do serious intellectual work.
2. Students must be known well. The student to teacher ratio must not exceed 80:1 in secondary schools or 20:1 in elementary schools, and teachers and students must spend extended time together during the day and over the weeks and years.
3. Teachers must have substantial authority over their work, must have time to collaborate, and must have shared groups of students for whom they take responsibility
4. Family and community involvement must be expected and cultivated.

Enacting all of these four elements requires making extremely hard choices at both the school and district levels. Enacting these four elements means creating schools that look significantly different from those we are used to. But enacting these four elements holds the promise of significantly transforming schools and improving the life and intellectual achievements of both students and teachers.

#1. Courses and curriculum must be designed so that all students are required to do serious intellectual work.

The key phrases in this essential element are "all students" and "serious intellectual work," and these key phrases are intended to address at least two common problems with conventional school design. First, in the typical comprehensive high school in the United States, and even in typical elementary schools, significant numbers of students are tracked or otherwise siphoned into courses whose curriculum lacks intellectual challenge and rigor. The conditions are not created for all students to develop their minds to their fullest, because it is simply not assumed that every student can or will do high quality intellectual work. High expectations are reserved for students in the upper tracks; we expect little from the rest.

The reality that some students are tracked away from the opportunity for serious intellectual engagement would be a grievous problem in any circumstance. It is especially grievous in current circumstances, where tracking patterns often parallel students' race and class backgrounds.

Second, courses which are ostensibly "college prep" or "honors" are not necessarily rigorous. Much of the work required is glorified busy-work, involving memorization and recitation of disconnected facts. This "essential element" suggests that coursework must be tied to real world problems and must involve the development of intellectual habits and skills such as problem-solving, collaborating, investigating various points of view, seeking connections to other realms of knowledge, and understanding the applications of knowledge acquired.

#2. Students must be known well. The student to teacher ratio must not exceed 80:1 in secondary schools or 20:1 in elementary schools, and teachers and students must spend extended time together during the day and over the weeks and years.

This essential element reflects the simple truth that a great deal of learning comes about as the result of human relationships. "Being known well" is a crucial element of learning for at least these four reasons:

• Students learn in different ways; there are different "ins" for each student, different stumbling blocks for each. To discover these and to tailor instruction accordingly, a teacher must know the students well and have time to address individual passions and needs.
• Learning involves taking risks, and a student is much more apt to take risks when he or she feels known, supported, and appreciated.
• Students want to "perform" for teachers they know and respect; there is very little motivation to do one's best work for a near stranger.
• Schools where students are known well tend to have extremely low rates of violence, and students learn best when they feel safe and at ease.

The exact student/teacher ratios named here might be adjusted slightly. But the essential element is intended to communicate the notion that the status quo in many secondary schools, where teachers see as many as 170 students a day, is simply incompatible with one of the central requirements of teaching and learning -- warm, human relationships, in which the teacher has the opportunity to personalize instruction enough to ensure that all students master the material at hand.

Along with manageable student/teacher ratios, spending extended time together is one of the vehicles for ensuring that teachers and students will come to know each other well. But this element implies something else, as well: students' academic program must have depth, coherence, and continuity. By "extended time," we do not necessarily mean longer days or longer school years. In typical school schedules, students are asked to delve into math for forty-five minutes, then to switch and spend forty-five minutes on history, then another on science. Thinking remains harried and superficial. Rarely is there time for in-depth investigations; rarely is there time to find connections between the different fields one is studying. Scheduling longer blocks of time during the day provides the opportunity for doing focused project work and bringing coherence between the different fields of study. Keeping groups of teachers and students together over weeks and years allows the opportunity to explore large themes from multiple perspectives, "spiraling" the curriculum instead of repeating it.

#3. Teachers must have substantial authority over their work, must have time to collaborate, and must have shared groups of students for whom they take responsibility.

If teaching well did not require knowing one's students well, it would perhaps be possible to "package" or "teacher proof" a curriculum and to mandate its use. But teaching well absolutely depends upon tailoring instruction to the needs of one's students. And because teachers are the only ones in the position to know their students well, they must have significant authority over what and how they teach.

Perhaps one of the reasons policy-makers have resisted giving teachers substantial authority over their work is the fear that teachers will not make good use of this authority, that they will not design high quality curriculum and teaching strategies. This fear is legitimate. The best way to ensure high quality work on the part of teachers is not, however, giving them a script to follow. Extensive research shows that having the opportunity to participate in a collaborative, professional community is the best way to support teachers to continue to grow and improve in their craft. Such a professional community provides teachers with the support they need to tailor curriculum and instructional strategies to the needs of their students.

The work teachers can do collaboratively is enhanced many-fold when the school schedules have been arranged so that teams of teachers have joint responsibility over groups of students. This enables a kind of individual "case-management" which multiplies the benefits of students being known well by individual teachers. In this situation, students are known well by a whole team of teachers, who together can strategize for the needs of individual students while simultaneously making the curriculum more coherent and cohesive for all.

#4. Family and community involvement must be expected and cultivated.

Persuasive research demonstrates that student achievement is highly correlated with parental involvement in school life.Yet for many parents, schools are mysterious or even forbidding places. And in many schools, parents are viewed as hindrances to the work of the school. The truth is that parents and teachers are essential collaborators. Like all collaborations, that between parents and teachers demands time, forethought, and ongoing attention. To be effective, the collaboration cannot be simply window dressing, but must be built around genuine joint work.

Parents are one important constituent of the school community. But more and more, we are learning how connections with the larger community can help make learning rigorous and relevant. Schools simply cannot shoulder alone the full responsibility of providing students with the skills and experiences they need. Relationships with businesses and community organizations -- places where students can learn from adults other than their parents and teachers through internships, community service, and apprenticeships -- are vital to a well-rounded education.

Conclusion

The task of redesigning schools in the ways suggested by these four "essential elements" is not technically difficult. Any of us could take a blank slate and carve out longer class periods, build a schedule with collaborative planning time for teachers, eliminate "tracking," and the like. The challenge is that we are not dealing with blank slates -- even if we have the good fortune to be launching a brand new school. A powerful sense of history and tradition govern many of the structures of schooling in America, and schools designed according to the four design elements simply do not feel like schools as teachers, students, parents, or policy-makers know them. It is hard to buck history and tradition, even when the traditions do not make sense.

In particular, the typical structure of American schools has assumed, implicitly, that not all children can or need to do rigorous intellectual work. We have been comfortable with schools that function to sort children as "achievers" and "non-achievers," often along lines of race and class. Changing schools in the ways suggested by the essential elements involves asserting strongly a different value and belief system, one that says that schools should not be in the business of sorting, but rather in the business of supporting all students to use their minds well. Embarking on this kind of transformation is much harder than the school reform efforts that have been the norm in the last century.

A typical strategy of school reform in America has been "reform by accretion." Whenever a problem has been discovered, we have created an additional program or a course to address it, for it is much easier to add on to the existing structure than to rethink it completely. Designing a school in accordance with the elements, however, requires us to allocate resources in radically different ways from those we are used to, negotiating the politics of subtraction, eliminating projects or programs held dear by some members of the community. It requires everyone -- administrators, teachers, students, parents, community members -- to adjust their roles, their regular ways of acting and interacting. It requires changing district and state policies that keep old practices in place. And to make it the project all more daunting, there is no one right template for this work. Schools must respond to their communities and contexts.

While the work is extremely challenging, we know it can be done. Coalition schools around the country have adopted these essential elements in ways that have profoundly improved their students' education. With determined leadership, teamwork, and a shared vision of schooling, it is possible to make the changes we need to help all children learn to use their minds well.

Appendix

A CES Vision of Schooling

Inside the Classroom and the School

CES has been engaged for over fifteen years in helping schools become places in which all student learn to use their minds well. Classrooms and schools that have implemented the essential elements of school design look and feel palpably different from most American elementary and secondary schools. The following represents a scene in a "high implementing" CES school, where studies are designed to be rigorous and relevant.

The Classroom

Walking into a CES high school science room, one might see groups of students bunched around their lab tables, pouring over various vials of water, test-tubes, and dip-sticks. They have just returned from a trip to their local river, where they have been collecting water samples over the past several weeks. As in many regions, local biologists have documented declines in the river's frog population. The students are running chemical analyses of the water, trying to substantiate their working hypothesis, which is that run-off from pesticides in the agricultural region upstream has harmed water quality and is leading to declines in the frog populations. While some classmates analyze the water, others are using the world wide web to research published studies on declines in frog population and on the chemical components of pesticides used locally. Students work shoulder to shoulder, sharing information and ideas easily and eagerly with one another. They clearly are practiced at collaboration, and they know and trust one another.

The students are determined to be thorough and careful and to come up with findings they can defend, for through the persistent leg-work of their teacher, the students have been invited by the local water management board to present their findings and recommendations at an upcoming board meeting. In the classroom, meanwhile, the teacher travels from student group to group, asking probing questions -- like those they will encounter when they present to the water board -- pushing students to reach beyond the most easy or obvious conclusions, and providing extra support for the students who are new to English and those who have sworn that they "can't do" science.

Inside the School

While CES classrooms are focused on helping schools develop skills to tackle real-world problems, to use research and reason to come to conclusions, and to present ideas coherently, CES schools are designed to create the environment in which all of this can happen. When these science students set about their work, they have time to dig in. The teachers and administrators have created a rotating two-hour block schedule, so that students can focus intensely on the problems they are investigating.

The science teacher does not have to worry that the time devoted to this project will prevent him from "covering" a number of other topics. Rather than assessing his students through tests that require memorization of a wide and disparate range of facts, this school assesses students based on public exhibitions, where depth of understanding is what gains high marks. Among other efforts to ensure that teachers will be able to know the students and their families well, the school has eliminated some clerical and administrative positions and devoted these resources to increasing the proportion of teachers on staff and to teaming, so that each teacher is responsible for no more than 80 students each day (rather than the 150 that is typical in many American high schools).

Districts and States that Support Reform

Just as the vitality of the classroom depends on the design of the school, so the ability of the school to make decisions which serve its students well depends on the work of the school district. The unfortunate fact is that most schools that have succeeded in significant reform have done so largely despite district and state policies; the best we have often hoped for is benign neglect. But one can imagine a scenario in which the work of the district and state in fact supports schools as they work to be rigorous and safe. The following scenarios are fictitious and are by no means exhaustive, but they give a glimpse of the possibility of what could happen if state and district policies and practices were aligned with what we know about the needs of students and teachers:

Inside the District

The district supporting the school described above provides professional development opportunities and resources around precisely this school's priorities: a "less is more" curriculum based on real-world problems. It has helped to unravel the red-tape that surrounded the school's move to block schedules, including making the schedule work with the bus, food, and custodial services. The district supports teachers in collaborating with people outside the school walls, such as the water management board. The district has helped generate support on the part of parents, university officials, and the state board of education for the school's exhibitions as a legitimate basis for graduation, and it has supported the school in endeavoring to make those assessments both flexible and rigorous. The district has worked with the teacher, administrator, and classified staff unions to support the school's decision to increase its percentage of teachers, and it regularly helps the school collect and analyze data on student learning so that the school can continue to improve its work.

At the State Level

At the state level, meanwhile, policies have been implemented which encourage local innovation and the flexible use of professional development dollars and other resources. Helping to create schools where students and teachers can know each other well, the state has sponsored the building of small schools, rather than schools built to house hundreds or thousands. Tax codes and funding formulas promote the equitable distribution of resources across the state, so that schools in poorer neighborhoods are able to offer competitive salaries and attract high quality teachers. State assessment systems and admission requirements to state universities both promote the use of authentic and real-world measures such as those depicted above.

This resource last updated: June 07, 2002

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