EducationNews.org

Many have observed that today's high school students lack the work ethic.I concur with the following points of view:

1.Far too many students coast through school and exert little effort; the current design of high schools contributes to their lack of interest and effort.

2.Students won't learn unless they discipline and push themselves;

3.Both parents and colleges are major enablers of mediocrity.Parents do not lower the boom on their kids when they attempt to slide by, and colleges lower admission standards to keep their schools full and their jobs safe.

So what would a high school look like that made students want to exceed minimum standards and not merely slide by? My guess it would look like an interscholastic sports team that emphasized teamwork, daily practice of fundamentals, daily feedback on individual and team performance, continual communication among coaches (viz. teachers) on how to do better the next day, continual opportunity for students to practice skills in competitive ("real world" or workplace-like) situations, expectations of helping fellow teammates (classmates) to improve, integration of knowledge to help students understand why they are learning something in a particular way, and the targeted use of technology to diagnose and improve abilities.

Excellent teachers and coaches produce students who want to be driven, want discipline, want to exceed expectations, and want to be part of a group with a higher purpose and winning mission.Students in high performance environments, whether a football, debate or robotics competition team, want to stay together long enough to produce excellence.Sustained time together in search of a noble cause also helps teenagers develop what they want most of all—good friends.

Contrast these intensive after school experiences with what happens during school--the traditional "assembly line" high school where students and teachers must change what they do every 50 minutes in response to a bell and adapt to 6-7 different work groups a day. Aside from shortening their attention span, students too often get lost in this chaos. No wonder for so many students the best part of the school day is to see friends between classes.

To engage today's teenagers and take full advantage of what their teachers can offer, high schools must substantially alter the way they deploy staff, organize curricula and the school day, and connect with the community. For example:

·Create smaller learning communities and let students concentrate on a career theme. Teachers would truly get to know their students as both would spend most of their day in a career theme department or academy (such as business, engineering and technology, health sciences, or expressive arts).

·A multidisciplinary team of teachers would run each career theme department. Technical subjects would be integrated with academic ones. Periodically, students could change career departments. Employers in a career pathway would help oversee curricula, contribute equipment and mentors, and provide student internships.

·Replace school bells with morning-afternoon scheduling. Students would take cross-disciplinary courses from teams of teachers who work together rather than in isolation. Students would stay together long enough to become part of teams that focus their attention on solving problems that require knowledge of different systems, just as they would in the real world.

·Ninth-grade students would take an intensive, team taught, computer-assisted, eight- to 12-week course that rapidly brings up their reading and math scores to grade level while providing career guidance and orientation to high school expectations.Success factors for this approach include the challenging cross-disciplinary curriculum, faculty teaming and small group coaching, emphases on workplace discipline and time management, daily feedback on class and individual performance, the use of courseware (e.g. PLATO, NovaNet, KeyTrain) to manage instruction and reporting, and most importantly, the blending of the "soft" teamwork, customer service and interpersonal skills with the "hard" reading, math, and computer skills.

Toward a high performance workplace

Converting schools into high performing work organizations is the key to engaging students and attracting and keeping the best teachers.To achieve high performance, high schools must replace linear assembly-line thinking with whole child thinking that integrates minds and bodies, academic and technical disciplines, multiple types of intelligence – in other words, our beings--with the way the world really is.When we are willing to embrace such changes, we will create a new generation of students who will want to expend their best efforts to get what their teachers can offer.

Barry E. Stern, a deputy assistant secretary of education under President George H.W. Bush, is an educational and work force development consultant in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He is also a senior fellow of the Haberman International Policy Institute in Education.

Publihed September 10, 2007