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A Richer Picture of Student Performance

Digital Portfolio, Chapter 8

University Heights High School
Bronx, New York

Contents

- About the School
- The Process: Issues in Implementation
    - Vision
    - Assessment
    - Technology
    - Logistics
    - Culture
- The Products: Sample Digital Portfolios
- Further Information
- Supplemental Material

About the School

Think of New York, and you'll probably think of things done on a grand scale. From the skyscrapers to Broadway to the sheer numbers of people, New York is synonymous with "big." Yet, within a city obsessed with size, New York is also the home to one of the nation's leading examples of small schools. Among these is University Heights High School (UHHS) in the Bronx.

University Heights was founded in 1987 as a public school. It is a secondary school for students starting in 7th grade, and going through high school graduation. There are about 400 students enrolled, with a staff of about 25.

The school takes advantage of its size in two ways. One is a focus on getting to know students well. When a student enrolls, she becomes part of a teacher's "family group"of between 15 and 20 students until she graduates. A set of three or four family groups becomes a "team,"and the teachers within that team design the curriculum and assessments for their 80 or so students. This way, no teacher is overwhelmed by large numbers of students. This leads to the other advantage: the small size allows the school to put a primary focus on helping all students meet high standards of achievement.

The school's academic focus is communicated through a set of "domains of learning." In 1995-96, the school established seven domains that grounded the curriculum and the assessment. These interdisciplinary domains include "communicating, crafting, and reflecting," "connecting the past, present, and future," and "thinking critically and questioning." (The details of these domains, and how they tie to the traditional subject areas and core knowledge, is discussed in the vision section.)

Students are asked to demonstrate habits, skills, and knowledge in each of these domains to move through the school. For example, before an entering middle school student can become a high school student, a student must demonstrate appropriate mastery in each of the seven domains; similarly, a high school senior must demonstrate a higher level of achievement in each of the domains before graduation.

The key to making this vision work is the "roundtable." As each student completes projects and accumulates other evidence of her skills in a certain domain, she puts together a portfolio of work that collectively shows her abilities and achievements. When she believes she is ready to move to the next level in the school (from middle school student to high school student; from high school student to high school senior; and from high school senior to graduate), the student presents the portfolio to a roundtable of 15 or so teachers, peers, and guests from outside the school.

Prior to the roundtable presentation, students prepare cover letters, describing why the set of work in the portfolio demonstrates mastery of the given domain. The participants at the roundtable have a chance to read the cover letter and to review the work done by the student. During the roundtable, the student begins with a presentation that describes the domain, and what her work shows about her understanding of the domain. After the student presentation, reviewers can ask questions of the student about her work, and discuss how that work meets the school's standards. After 45 minutes or so, the student steps outside, and the reviewers determine if they believe that the student has indeed met the standard established for mastery of this domain. At the end, the student returns, and hears about areas of what she has demonstrated that work well and areas that need improvement, and told whether she has passed or whether she needs to prepare for another roundtable.

(For more details on this process, you should obtain the issue of the Coalition of Essential Schools' periodical Performance which focuses on University Heights. This web site contains supplemental material about the school and its curriculum and assessment.)

UHHS has had great success with its students. This atmosphere of rigorous, yet personalized, work has helped students first receive their high school diploma (only 2.8% leave high school before graduation); and then go on to other successes (42% of the class of 1993, the first class to graduate by portfolio, went on to higher education, and were still in college as of June, 1996; the numbers increase to 64% and 65% of the classes of 1994 and 1995 still in college at the end of the 1995-1996 school year).

In this case, the Digital Portfolio was a chance to add technology to a school that had already done a great deal of work with portfolios and standards. While there were definite bumps in the road, it was in many ways easier to add technology to an environment where the assessment system was already in place than in some of our other sites where the technology was in place and the assessment was not. Perhaps this is because technological problems are more defined, and the solutions easier to implement than the problems involved in assessment and culture.

The Process: Issues in Implementation

Vision

A school's vision helps students, parents, and faculty to understand what is expected of students.

What should a student know and be able to do?

The University Heights community, on an annual basis, wrestles with the question of setting its standards. The standards, as defined in the "Domains of Learning" described below, determine what is expected of all students in the school; "benchmarks" show the level of achievement that, say, a middle school student, or a high school graduate, should be able to demonstrate.

During the work with the Digital Portfolio project, the school had established seven domains of learning. The school described these domains as follows. (In 1996-97, the domains were updted by the school.)

We use the Domains and Habits of Learning to plan curriculum and to assess learning at University Heights. The seven domains represent the content of the college preparatory curriculum offered at University Heights, Instead of aiming to earn forty separate credits, distributed among several subject areas, students at University Heights work to create portfolios within the seven domains.

This is not a conventional list; it's important to leave the traditional subject areas behind when you read it. And please do take the time to read each of the Habits of Learning under each of the Domains. To look for the disciplines in these domains or to assume that the domains are merely new titles for the old subject areas is to misunderstand what we are trying to do.

Assessment

The school's assessment system lets students learn about their progress towards fulfilling the vision.

How can students demonstrate the vision?

The curriculum at University Heights makes heavy use of "projects."Each project stems from "essential questions," such as "What makes a culture unique? What common themes are there among cultures?" The projects are broad investigations of a particular question, which allows each student to both demonstrate what basic knowledge and skills they have learned and to gain new knowledge and skills to help complete the investigation. In the school's words,

We design projects that connect with students' lives and what they care deeply about. Whenever possible we use real-life problems which lend themselves to a variety of approaches and disciplines instead of using simulated and oversimplified problems that arise out of fixed, familiar disciplines. We want students to be working on real-world, authentic, socially conscious, conceptual problems. In addition, we design projects to be "ill-structured" and engaging enough to allow for exploration and discovery on the part of both the teachers and the students. Each project is designed to have students examine answers to Essential Questions by using literature, mathematics, second language, and research.

The projects lead to exhibitions, and almost always include some element of student work that can appear in a portfolio and then be presented at a roundtable.

Why do we collect student work?

University Heights has a commitment to using rigorous academic pursuits as the cornerstone of the school's every day work. The portfolios and roundtables were always important at the school, but when the school moved to graduation by portfolio in 1993, the collection of student work took on additional significance. Students know that if they do not have work that clearly demonstrates the skills of a particular domain, they are not going to advance in the school -- and ultimately will not be able to graduate. So, on one level, the answer is easy: students collect work because they have to.

There's a deeper reason, though. Student work is about demonstrating who a student is and what he or she can do; the collection of student work is a form of self-expression and reflection. University Heights's commitment to personalizing education means that each student needs to be aware of what he or she does well and what needs improvement. This self-knowledge comes from examining what he or she has done; the examination is served well by both self-reflection, and by public demonstration, as through the roundtables.

What audiences are most important to us?

The assessment system at University Heights is primarily designed as an internal tool, for the school's community of teachers, students, administrators, staff, and parents. By bringing these groups together at roundtables to review the work in a portfolio, a student can gain the insight of those who know her work well, and know her from different aspects of her life.

The school has also been conscious of showing its efforts to outsiders. Visitors from throughout the New York area, and beyond, are invited to participate in roundtables, and thus become involved in setting standards. College admissions officers need to understand what University Heights High School students are asked to do, since over 60% of recent graduating classes have gone on to higher education. The school wants students to be able to demonstrate their skills and present their accomplishments to a wide variety of audiences. However, the process of roundtables was primarily designed as a tool to help students understand what they have mastered, and to help the school understand what the student has accomplished.

How do we know what's good?

As is true of most decisions at University Heights, deciding what work meets a standard is done by consensus. At a roundtable, all of the reviewers are asked to provide "warm" and "cool" feedback. (These terms come from the article "Three Pictures of an Exhibition:Warm, Cool, and Hard," by Joe McDonald.) The "warm" feedback comes from a knowledge of the student, and what efforts he or she has made to complete the work. Warm feedback takes into account knowledge of the student's circumstances at the time he or she was doing the work, and his or her prior knowledge and skills. "Cool" feedback is more "objective." Given what is expected of a student at a certain grade level, does the work demonstrate that expectation? (An example: One person might react to a piece of writing of a middle school student with the "cool" comment, "I don't think this is the level of writing I would expect of a student entering high school." Another person might make the "warm" comment, "I agree that this is not quite at the same level, but it shows remarkable growth from where this student was at the beginning of the year.")

Collectively, the warm and cool feedback provide a sense of the student's growth, and of the student's current level of achievement. Both factors need to be taken into account to help a student understand where she is on the path to graduation, and what her work thus far has helped her to accomplish.

In roundtables, the warmest feedback doesn't always come from the people who know the student best and the coolest feedback doesn't always come from the outsiders. To take one example from the Performance article on University Heights, one student re-submitted a paper, largely because his grandfather thought the paper lacked depth and detail. Other reviewers may be largely impressed by the effort made by a student, but may overlook what the student is capable of achieving.

The discussion of actual student work typically clarifies the meaning of the standards. Each roundtable is an opportunity to discuss the question, So what do we really mean when we say "students know how and when to use scientific methods"? Students who participate in their peers' roundtable presentations learn how their work is evaluated, and begin to internalize their own sense of a standard of excellence. (They also have the opportunity to look at portfolios from previous years' students.) Teachers who participate in many roundtables gain a sense of what students can do when given the opportunity, and can "raise the bar" appropriately.

Technology

Digital Portfolios are obviously dependent on the use of technology, but a school's effective use of technology goes beyond the use of equipment.

What hardware, software, and networking will we need?

The configuration of equipment at UHHS was deliberately designed to reflect the way the school currently operates. Students spend their days in teams, consisting of three to four teachers and sixty to eighty students. Within the school, there are two teams on each of three floors.

The school decided to put a cluster of computers in each team's area. A cluster contained five computers, two of which had multimedia capabilities, and a printer. The two teams on the same floor shared a common file server, and other peripheral equipment, such as a scanner and zip drive.

Because of difficulties in the physical plant of the school, the networks on each floor could not be (during this project) physically connected to each other. While it was a bit more difficult to support three separate networks, it was hardly noticed by the students, since they were likely to spend almost all of their day in their team, anyway. Thus, since students tended to spend most of their day in one area, it was less critical that they be able to access their work from any place in the building.

University Heights received, as part of the grant, 18 IBM PC 350 computers, with 486 DX2-66 processors, 8 megabytes of RAM, and 270 megabyte hard drives, and sound cards. The school's 12 multimedia machines were IBM PC 350 machines, with 486 DX4-100 processors, CD-ROM drives, an upgraded hard drive (to 540 megabytes), 16 megabytes of RAM, and sound cards. Each machine also had an IBM10BaseT Ethernet card, and ran Novell Netware for the network. The machines were connected as three separate LAN's (one per floor). Each of the three floors also contained a machine with a video digitizing cards, two scanners (one flatbed and one page scanner), and two laser printers. The school also used 3 IBM PC servers, model 86400NJ, each with 24 to 36 megabytes of RAM, a 486 DX2-66 processor, and 1.75 gigabyte hard drive.

Who are the primary users of the equipment?

Given the structure of the school (teams of students taught by teams of teachers), students and teachers move fairly freely among the rooms used by a team. The computers were typically set up by the team to make them publicly available to all of the students and teachers within the team. Whoever needs the computer at a given moment uses it and then returns to other work.

Who will support the system?

The greatest difficulty faced by University Heights in this project was the lack of personnel. The individual on staff responsible for networking the computers was only in the school half-time (since he provided support to both UniversityHeights and another small New York City public school), and even when there, had other responsibilities besides technology support. The school lacked a person to help, on a daily basis, provide the technical support and strategic thinking required to help the school with the long term plans.

Now, prior to this grant, University Heights had few machines: one small lab of 286-based machines for word processing, and one lab of relatively recent Macintoshes. Thus, it may have made sense, initially, to have a technology person do other things at the school and work with multiple schools. With the addition of 30 machines, though, the school is rethinking its technical support needs, and realizes the need for someone to be devoted full-time to the school's technological system.

A few students became involved in general technology support and particular support for the Digital Portfolios. General support students helped by installing software, or providing some inventory of the school's equipment. A couple of students particularly helped by organizing the information to prepare for the school's first Digital Portfolio demonstration (at the school's "External Review" session). These students learned how to digitize, scan, and use peripherals like zip drives to make a sample portfolio available to a number of viewers. While expanding the number of students willing and able to provide technical support will certainly help the school, there is still a need for a strategic thinker who can work with the school's family groups to distribute computing expertise throughout the school.

The distribution of the equipment to the school exemplified the dilemma. The computers for the grant were essentially networked and ready to be used by October of 1995. However, the school needed to first wait for tables to arrive from the city. Then, the network configuration was supposed to be approved by the school district's technical support personnel. Meanwhile, the school's computing coordinator had concerns about distributing the machines around the building (and thus, being responsible for their maintenance) when it wasn't yet clear that the rest of the staff would be able to keep up the network when he wasn't there. The combination of these delays meant that most of the machines went unused until late February of 1996. Because of this, many students had already done a great deal of work towards their current year's portfolios, and the school decided to slow down the experiment by completing just one digital portfolio for the school year as a sample for the following year's work.

Logistics

The creation of a school-wide digital portfolio requires that a school consider its use of time and space.

When will information be digitized? Who will do it?

A core group of two students (Sam and Jessica) became the local experts with digital portfolio software and with the equipment required to digitize student work. The school decided to create a complete digital portfolio with text, graphics, and video components. These two students worked closely with another student (Heidy), whose portfolio was digitized. The team videotaped Heidy's work, such as a peer evaluation session, scanned graphics, and word processed many of her written documents. Then, the students put together the digital portfolio presentation, arranging the windows and the information within the portfolio.

The assumption for future years is that students will digitize their work as they go along. Now that all the equipment is in place, students are already word processing much of their work. When a student knows that something is going to go into the portfolio, they can use the scanner to enter that work. While word processing and scanning are becoming familiar tasks to most students, digitizing video and audio still requires some kind of technical expertise, provided by the school's computing coordinator or one of a small group of students who know how to handle that equipment.

The time for preparing portfolios is already built into the school's daily routine; most days, students are working independently on projects, rather than sitting in classes, so students can fairly easily find the time to digitize their work, and, ultimately, use the software to enter their work into the portfolio.

Who will select the work?

Students select work for their portfolios that they believe will demonstrate the skills and knowledge of a particular domain. Each entry in the portfolio has already been assessed by a teacher, and teachers regularly discuss the work with the 15 or so students within their family groups. Because portfolios are a central part of the school's work--that is, they are required for moving to the next level or to graduate--students know that they have to select a set of work that will demonstrate their abilities, and regularly discuss with their teachers what should be in the portfolio, and what needs to be improved.

Who will reflect on the work?

There are essentially three opportunities for reflecting on the work. First, students create cover letters for the portfolio for each domain. In these letters, students describe how each entry in the portfolio demonstrates the skills, knowledge, and habits that are part of the domain, and collectively, how the entire portfolio shows growth. These letters are made public during the roundtables, but are primarily an opportunity for a student to reflect on the domain and how his or her work has helped her to achieve mastery of that domain.

Second, teachers work with the students to reflect on their portfolio entries. Each teacher has a family group of about 15 students that are together from the time the students enter to the time they graduate. The family group spends most of the day together, and at least some part of each day is used for reflecting on what the students have learned and what they still need to accomplish. As each student prepares a portfolio for a roundtable, he or she will turn to the teacher for help in deciding what goes into the portfolio, and what the work represents. Teachers also reflect on the roundtable process with the students after the roundtable presentations.

Third, the roundtables themselves are opportunities for the students to discuss their work with a group of "insiders" and "outsiders." Parents and relatives are always invited to roundtables, and are in attendance much more often than not. Peers come to provide support and to help the student describe how their work fits with the standards of the domain. Outside folks provide a different perspective, not shaped as much by the daily experiences of the school, but from other experiences. And, of course, the teachers and students themselves have the opportunity to build on the reflections they have done earlier.

Culture

For digital portfolios to be taken seriously as a school-wide endeavor, the school's culture needs to allow for regular conversation about student work and about the school's standards.

Is the school used to discussing student work?

Student work is at the core of the school's curriculum and assessment practices, and is regularly discussed in family groups, teams, and among the staff as a whole. Because the school has created its own standards and domains, and because it uses portfolios as a means towards graduation, the staff examines student work to determine whether its standards make sense, and whether a student is ready to move to the next level in the school.

Roundtables take place just about every Friday during the school year, so no more than a week goes by without a critical discussion of student work and whether that work meets a standard.

Creating the culture took some doing, even for a school that started from scratch. Initially, the school knew that it wanted to have another method for students to demonstrate their abilities besides standardized tests. Each teacher came with an intuitive sense of what students should know and be able to do. What allowed the culture to progress was a commitment on the part of (at first) one team of ten teachers to work together to create a portfolio system. At one point, the group reported that:

We have been carefully writing, talking, and rewriting to find the language which we as teachers can agree describes our agendas for the classroom--many of which are hidden or assumed. We think that the more clear we can be about our pedagogical values and assumptions, the more available these will be to critical scrutiny by students, parents, and other community members. Teacher clarity is one way in which we are working to foster more parent power in the school.

The key elements in the initial conversations was that, one, the conversation needed to make assumptions explicit and clear, so that any person could explain their standards and expectations to any one else in the group, and two, the conversation was to be inclusive, allowing parents and students to be partners in the conversation about standards from the very beginning. By opening up their own thoughts on standards to colleagues, parents, and students, the teachers clarified, for themselves, their expectations, and thus, are better able to state how they are assessing student work.

Is the school open to tuning standards? With whom?

Each roundtable presentation, in a way, is an attempt at tuning standards. (The roundtable format itself is somewhat similar to the "tuning protocol" developed in the Coalition's Exhibitions Project. See David Allen's article "The Tuning Protocol," and Joe McDonald's book Redesigning School, for more information.) The group of parents, students, teachers, staff, and visitors that review a portfolio are not only evaluating the student work, but describing their understanding of the standards, and what it means for a student to demonstrate habits, skills, and knowledge.

The school also has an annual "review" at the end of the year. During this all-day event, faculty begin by discussing the domains of learning, and how students have done towards achieving those domains. Then, visitors are invited to examine student portfolios (in June, 1996, this included examining digital portfolios) and, through the lens of student work, discuss the work of the school in helping students to achieve those standards. The entire faculty participates, and, at the beginning of the new school year, take the ideas generated by themselves and by the visitors, and think about how the standards need to be shaped and tuned for the coming school year.

The Products: Sample Digital Portfolios

The UHHS Digital Portfolios begin with an introductory screen, showing the student's photo, and a button which links to the main menu.

The main menu shows the school's domains of mastery along the left side of the screen. Each student creates a portfolio for each of the domains. Click on any of the domain buttons on the left, and a description of the domain appears in the bottom right corner, and a list of the student's entries for this domain are shown in the large window on the right.

This screen shows one exhibition from the portfolio. The student work, be it text, graphics, audio, or video, appears on the left side of the screen. Additional student work can be found under the "Click for more..." option on the right. (If you view this portfolio from the samples, you will find the video clip called "Signing" under the "Click for more..." option.) The menu in the top right corner also provides information to help put the work in context (see Figure 4).

The command box shown above appears in the upper right corner of the entry screen (see Figure 3). The left side of the box lists a set of information that helps to put each entry in context. The right side of the box contains buttons that allow you to arrange the components of the entry, or to navigate to another part of the portfolio.

The contextual information shown by the checkboxes are:

• The Cover Letter is written by the student to describe how the collection of entries demonstrates mastery of the given domain. Thus, the same cover letter will appear for every entry related to the same domain.
• The Assignment describes what the student was asked to do.
• The Assessment contains assessments from the teachers, or others, about the work. When you view the assessment window, you will note that multiple assessors could add their work to a student's portfolio; over time, this could include peer assessors, teachers, or parents.

The right side of the command box allows the user to control views of the portfolio:

• A user may move the windows around the screen, and under the Edit menu, choose the "Set Layout" option to store the current layout of windows. The Revert button goes back to the last saved layout of windows.
• When a user opens an entry, not all of the components may be immediately visible. All of the components are listed in the box labeled Click for more... ; clicking on the arrow shows the complete list, from which the user may choose one to display. (To save time loading the portfolio, multimedia components are initially hidden, but may be made visible by clicking on the Click for more... list.)
• The Menu button returns to the menu of entries, and the Exit button leaves the portfolio.

Further Information

Contact
University Heights High School
West 181st Street and University Avenue
Bronx, NY 10453
(718) 289-5300
Deborah Harris, Principal
Paul Allison, Curriculum Coordinator
e-mail: paul_allison@cce.org

Publications
Allen, David, "The Tuning Protocol," Studies on Exhibitions, No. 15, Coalition of Essential Schools.**

Cushman, Kathleen, "A Community Sets Standards Around the Table" Performance, Number 7, June 1994.**

McDonald, Joseph, "Three Pictures of an Exhibition: Warm, Cool, and Hard," Exhibitions Series No. 3, Providence, RI: Coalition of Essential Schools, 1992.**

New York Assessment Collection, a CD-ROM and print publication produced by the Coalition of Essential Schools in collaboration with the New York State Education Department, 1996.**

Sizer, Theodore R. Horace's Hope, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996. (The third book in Dr. Sizer's "Horace" series includes descriptions of work at various members of the Coalition of Essential Schools, including University Heights.)

**(These publications may be ordered from the Coalition of Essential Schools, One Davol Square, Providence, RI 02903.)

Supplemental Information

The information on the following pages are handouts from the school describing the school as a whole (in English and Spanish), the curriculum and assessment, and the domains as they were updated for the 1996-97 school year.

Who are We?

Established in Spring, 1987, University Heights is an internationally recognized alternative school, a City University of New York Affiliated School, a member of the Center for Collaborative Education and the coalition of Essential Schools and an original partner school with the New York State Compact for Learning. The 350 secondary school students are of all ages and have a variety of past school experiences. We share a philosophical commitment to being:

A Caring Community. We are committed to decency, respect and trust. We avoid punishment and aim for fairness. We are a community of people who work together to resolve conflicts without violence. Students work together in Family Groups which not only manage their portfolios, but also address both individual issues and issues which arise in our school and in our society.

A Learning Community. We work in three integrated learning teams which keep students for their entire stay here, defining together authentic learning, authentic assessment and mastery of our Domains and Habits of Learning. Students participate in service learning, college classes and problem-solving projects to meet their goals.

A Diverse Community. We gain strength through our multicultural, multiage, multi-talented community and use that strength as the foundation for our curriculum which celebrates and values the differences within our school community and our global community. We all participate in decisions which affect us by building consensus together throughout our community.

A Collaborative Community. We collaborate with the Coalition of Essential Schools, our campus community, our families, The New York City Board of Education, our "critical friends" from the educational community, and the community as a whole. Working together, we set standards for powerful learning. We value all voices and hold ourselves accountable by making our work public.

A Standard-Setting Community. All students move through a series of benchmarks and are graduated by a demonstration of habits, skills, and knowledge in seven interdisciplinary portfolios which are assessed by a variety of insiders / outsiders at Roundtables. The students must meet standards of expression, numeracy, and inquiry throughout each Domain and must be members in good standing of our school community.

Quienes Somos?

University Heights es una escuela alternativa fundada en 1987. UHHS es reconocida en todo el pais y estamos afiliados a CUNY, somos miembro de el Centro de Educacion Colaborativa (CCE) y la Coalicion de Escuelas Esenciales. tambien somos una escuela piloto del Compact for Learning - Departamento de Educacion del Estado de Nueva York. Los 425 estudiantes de secundaria tienen diferentes edades y han tenido una variedad de experiencias en las escuelas anteriores. Nosotros compartimos un compromiso que incluye:

UNA COMUNIDAD CONCIENTE - Nosotros estamos comprometidos a la decencia, respeto y confianza. Nosotros evitamos el "castigo" y nos concentramos en ser justos. Nosotros somos una comunidad que trabaja junta para resolver conflictos sin violencia. Los estudiantes trabajan juntos en Grupos de Familia que no solamente monitoran el portafolio del estudiante pero que tambien bregan con las dificultades personales del estudiante asi como los problemas que puedan surgir en nuestra escuela y en nuestra sociedad en general.

UNA COMUNIDAD DONDE SE APRENDE - Nosotros trabajamos en "teams" grupos integrados y en los cuales los estudiantes permanecen durante la estadia total aqui en UHHS. Juntos definimos y practicamos lo que es aprendizaje autentico, evaluacion del estudiante autentica y maestria de los Domains (areas) y Habits (habitos) de aprendizaje. Los estudiantes participan en Servicio a la Comunidad, clases a nivel de colegio, y a en proyectos de "solucion de Problemas para poder alcanzar las metas antes mencionadas.

UNA COMUNIDAD DIVERSA - Nosotros obtenemos fuerzas por medio de nuestra comunidad multicultural, multi-talentosa y de diferentes edades. Usamos esta fuerza como fundacion para nuestro curriulum (curso de estudio) que celebra y valora las diferencias dentro de nuestra comunidad de la escuela asi como dentro de la comunidad en general.

UNA COMUNIDAD DE COLABORACION - Nosotros colaboramos con la Coalicion de Escuelas Esenciales, Bronx Community College , nuestros padres/guardianes y la Junta de Educacion y con la comunidad en general. Trabajando juntos establecemos standards para un aprendizaje fuerte y profundo. Nosotros reconocemos a todas las voces y nosotros mismos somos responsables en haciendo nuestro trabajo publico.

UNA COMUNIDAD DONDE SE ESTABLECEN STANDARDS - Todos los estudiantes pasan por una serie de "pruebas" y se graduan cuando demuestra sus habitos , destrezas y conocimiento en siete portafolios interdisciplinarios que son presentados y evaluados en una Mesa Redonda. Los estudiantes tienen que pasar las pruebas en expresion, numeros (matematicas ) y envistagaciones en cada area y tienen que tener buena asistencia y comportamiento.

Curriculum and Assessment at University Heights

Nancy Mohr, Principal
Deborah Harris, Assistant Principal

We have been graduating students by portfolios since 1993, and students at all levels (grades 6-12) use portfolios for promotion. We ask critical friends from outside of University Heights and parents or family members to join the faculty in assessing students and their portfolios. Critical friends and parents take part in Roundtables where students present their work to their peers, as well as to teachers, family members and invited guests. Students are promoted or graduated only when they prove they are ready at their Roundtables.

Family Groups, Pairs, Quads and Teams
Students at University Heights work in one inter-disciplinary, non-graded, heterogeneous family group and with one family group teacher all day, all year, until they graduate. This family group teacher manages the portfolios and facilitates the Roundtables for his or her students.

Each teacher and his or her family group is also paired with another family group (as if each student had cousins). These pairs of teachers are also in "quads" for the purposes of curriculum, planning, support and accountability. Two quads make a team (8 or 9 teachers) which meets weekly. The teachers on these have diverse specialities, and support each other in developing and implementing curriculum.

In summary, one group of students and teachers works together for the entire school day and for a number of years to create portfolios that show the students' abilities, knowledge, and values within each of the seven Domains and the Habits of Learning, listed below.

Projects
We are committed to working with students to create projects that enable them to build arguments to answer Essential Questions. We design projects that connect with students' lives and what they care deeply about. Whenever possible we use real-life problems which lend themselves to a variety of approaches and disciplines instead of using simulated and oversimplified problems that arise out of fixed, familiar disciplines. We want students to be working on real-world, authentic, socially conscious, conceptual problems. In addition, we design projects to be "ill-structured" and engaging enough to allow for exploration and discovery on the part of both the teachers and the students. Each project is designed to have students examine answers to Essential Questions by using literature, mathematics, second language, and research.

Exhibitions
Upon completion of a project, students present their work to others. Sometimes these presentations are done informally within peer groups, and other times they are formal presentations to an outside audience. When exhibiting their work, students answer Essential Questions and demonstrate what they have done and what they know. They also answer questions about the topic studied or their experiences.

Portfolios and Roundtables
From the beginning of their stay at University Heights until they graduate, students prepare portfolios for each of our seven domains. In each, they put work from earlier semesters as well as recent projects.

When they are ready (according to the standards within each Benchmark), students present their portfolios at Roundtables in which they are responsible for convincing a group of insiders and outsiders that they have indeed hastened the Domain. They must prepare to answer questions about their work, and even revise it if it is determined that the student is not ready for promotion or graduation within each Domain. Only when students have successfully presented seven portfolios at the appropriate level will they be promoted or receive their diplomas.

Cover Letters
Students write cover letters to describe each item in their portfolios. Cover letters are attached to the work so that one not only sees the product of the students' efforts, but also their self-assessment of what they have learned and accomplished. In cover letters, students refer to the Habits of Learning under each Domain to describe what they have learned by completing the work. Therefore the cover letter is as important as the work itself because without it we cannot know just how much was accomplished.

Domains and Habits of Learning
We use the following Domains and Habits of Learning to plan curriculum and to assess learning at University Heights. The seven Domains represent the content of the college preparatory curriculum offered at University Heights. Instead of aiming to earn forty separate credits, distributed among several subject areas, students at University Heights work to create portfolios within the seven domains.

This is not a conventional list; it's important to leave the traditional subject areas behind when you read it. And please do take the time to read each of the Habits of Learning under each of the Domains. To look for the disciplines in these domains or to assume that the domains are merely new titles for the old subject areas is to misunderstand what we are trying to do.

Over the years, we have been moving toward the ideal of a "single-discipline" school, a model of schooling that is "an alternative to the disciplines as a basis for organizing general education.-." As one education consultant has written, "Single-discipline schooling":

·can provide students with a comprehensive model of reality, allow them to organize their thinking about themselves and the world around them thoughtfully, and deliberately, and give them ways to deal successfully with matters far more complex than can be dealt with when reality is marked off according to the familiar disciplines (Brady, "Single-Discipline Schooling," Phi Delta Kappan, February 1993, p. 439).

Because we had been working to integrate separate disciplines into one course of general study, a few years after the founding of University Heights, we asked teachers of all subjects to tell us what they wanted high school students to know, to be able to do, and to value within their specific disciplines. We wanted to know what these teachers wanted a graduate to be like, what habits they wanted their students to have before they graduated. What struck us was that common themes ran through all of the teachers' responses. No matter what their particular subject areas, the teachers we talked to had similar goals for the secondary school students in their classrooms.

Teachers said they wanted high school graduates to communicate effectively, use numbers in powerful ways, be aware of their strengths and weaknesses, act with responsibility and plan for the future, think critically and work hard to solve problems, work well with others, be good citizens, know their culture and history, and make ethically sound decisions. Parents wanted these things too, while emphasizing responsibility and having the skills necessary for success in life. Employers and business people also told us that these are the things they value in employees. We were able to take the lists of goals--produced by teachers of many disciplines, parents, and students--and put each "outcome" into one of seven categories. These categories then became our Domains. A couple of years later we began to revise our outcomes with the idea that these descriptions should represent Habits of Learning. This is the approach we take with these Domains and Habits of Learning. They represent the habits a student needs to develop in any class or content area.

Having said this, we recognize that this list must be continually re-worked by the parents. students. teachers, and critical friends of our school. The "outcomes" were changed after the first two years of use, then--a year later--we changed the language of both the Domains and the Habits of Learning. We have agreed to make such revisions at the beginning of each school year. We welcome any feedback that you might give us, from general impressions to actual written habits that you think would be good to add. Working to build consensus about our goals is a never-ending process to which we would welcome your voice.

Domains and Habits of Learning, 1996-1997

Domains Approved by Policy Council, September 9, 1996

Habits of Learning / Levels Approved by Policy Council, October 7, 1996

We welcome any feedback on the wording of these Domains and Habits of Learning.

Portfolios for these Domains must include projects in each of these areas of concentration:

• Math, Science, & Technology
• Humanities
• Service & Health

Domain: Communicating, Crafting, and Reflecting
General Habits of Learning

Level 1 Identify own strengths and weaknesses in using writing, speaking, numbers, the arts, media, and second language to formulate, clarify, and reflect on ideas.

Level 2 Appreciate and examine models, and use peer feedback to revise and polish work.

Level 3 Use extended writing and speaking to show understanding of important concepts and processes in academic disciplines.

Level 4 Exhibit, publish, perform, or speak publicly for an authentic audience in the school building using both English and a second language.

Advanced Habits of Learning

Level 5 Show an understanding of the creative processes and standards used by artists, writers, mathematicians, scientists, or other creative thinkers.

Level 6 Exhibit, publish, perform, or speak publicly for an authentic audience outside of the school building using both English and a second language.

Domain: Recognizing Patterns and Making Connections
General Habits of Learning

Level 1 Identify, assess, and articulate own strategies for recognizing patterns and connections.

Level 2 Analyze and experiment with different strategies for understanding patterns and connections.

Level 3 Analyze patterns and make connections using the content and processes of math, science, history, psychology, literature, language, and the arts.

Level 4 Connect learning from disciplined inquiries and exhibitions to each other and to personal life.

Advanced Habits of Learning

Level 5 Show an understanding of how patterns and connections are used in similar and contrasting ways in math, science, history, psychology, literature, language, and the arts.

Level 6 Connect personal, local and global issues through interdisciplinary research.

Domain: Critical Thinking and Ethical Decision-Making
General Habits of Learning

Level 1 Articulate and evaluate own problem solving processes and values.

Level 2 Analyze and use different strategies for solving problems and making moral choices.

Level 3 Employ important concepts and processes from academic disciplines to analyze and solve problems.

Level 4 Identify problems of personal significance and implement solutions using the important concepts and processes that have been learned.

Advanced Habits of Learning

Level 5 Apply strategies, tools and models from ethics, logic, mathematics or other disciplines to support and defend positions.

Level 6 Do independent research and find solutions to important social problems for people beyond the school building.

Domain: Taking Responsibility for Myself and My Community
General Habits of Learning

Level 1 Identify and assess own habits of health, respect, and commitment needed to be successful school and community members.

Level 2 Analyze and consider other perspectives on what deep respect and decency are.

Level 3 Use disciplined inquiries to evaluate personal and organizational characteristics, skills and strategies that facilitate accomplishment of mutual goals.

Level 4 Give service to the school and outside community.

Advanced Habits of Learning

Level 5 Explore and identify the expectations and support systems necessary to succeed in college, career, and in other roles one may have after high school.

Level 6 Do independent research and take action to demonstrate an understanding of interconnected local and global issues.

Domain: Working Together and Resolving Conflicts
General Habits of Learning

Level 1 Identify own behaviors in group problem-solving situations.

Level 2 Participate in various group problem-solving experiences and identify successful group behaviors.

Level 3 Design exhibitions that show an understanding of the theories of mediation, negotiation, consensus, social psychology and group dynamics.

Level 4 Apply theories and skills learned in inquiries and exhibitions to group problem-solving situations that show personal connections to the learning.

Advanced Habits of Learning

Level 5 Demonstrate the use of key concepts and processes within the disciplines of social psychology, sociology, or cultural studies.

Level 6 Facilitate effective interpersonal and intergroup relationships with groups beyond the school.

Original material, Copyright, 1997

David Niguidula
Coalition of Essential Schools
Annenberg Institute for School Reform

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