Planning a Life – Students at Hope High School, in Providence, Are Learning to Set Goals for Themselves. Students All Over the State
By LINDA BORG Journal Staff Writer
PROVIDENCE – In Jon Mahone’s advisory class, the students are not discussing the Civil War or the U.S. Constitution. They’re talking about what it means to be disciplined, to master a subject, to set personal goals.
Mahone asks his Hope High School class to think about the meaning of the following words: determination, discipline and mastery. Under each word, he tells them to write down a couple of goals.
“What we’re talking about today is some small goals we can set on the physical level, the social, even the spiritual,” Mahone says. “I want you guys to make this your own, to make this personal.
“Give me an example of being disciplined,” he says.
“Coming to school on time,” a student says.
“OK,” Mahone says. “And how do you do that?”
“Get an alarm clock,” says another student.
“Where does determination come from?” Mahone says.
“It comes from inside you. If you want to be a boxer and your left hand is weak, you got to work on that hand.”
Mahone tells them to be realistic. If you want to improve your vocabulary, commit to reading so many pages a day or so many books a month. You can’t run until you can walk, he says.
“My goal,” he tells them, “is to be the best teacher I can be. But I also need to be realistic, to understand the obstacles in my path.”
Mahone, a history teacher, then hands out a four-page pamphlet that he wrote called the “Art of the Self.” Inside, he talks about what it takes to become a success.
“Being a student does not necessarily mean going to school,” he says. “It means being observant and aware. It means thinking and reflecting on where you want to go in life and finding a path to get there.”
AT HOPE, every student will be asked to complete an Individual Learning Plan, a blueprint for the next four years that spells out the teen’s academic, career and personal goals.
Think of it as a high school version of What Color is Your Parachute, the popular career advice book.
Hope isn’t alone. Every high school in the state must develop Individual Learning Plans by 2008, and those plans must include the student’s personal as well as academic goals.
Although other high schools are moving ahead with their own versions of the plans, state officials say that Providence is in the vanguard. And Hope High School is leading the pack in Providence.
“Are other schools taking a personal approach to learning? Yes,” says Nicholas Donohue, the state-appointed special master at Hope. “Are other schools doing it as well? I don’t think so.”
Frustrated by the school’s slow pace of reform, state Education Commissioner Peter McWalters intervened last winter, telling the district to do three things: get the students to school, keep them in school, and raise their aspirations.
According to Donohue, who is monitoring the school’s progress, Hope has met the first two goals and is hard at work on the third.
On a larger scale, Rhode Island is the only state in the country to include the social, emotional and physical well-being of students in its personal learning plans, according to the Education Commission of the States, a national clearinghouse on education issues.
FOR THE PAST century, high schools have been stubbornly resistant to change. In 1996, a national study called Breaking Ranks: Changing an American High School, said the high school of the 21st century needed to be much more human, much more student-centered.
“The high school is obsolete,” says Joseph DiMartino, director of the Secondary School Redesign Program at Brown University’s Educational Alliance, “because it does extremely well at what it was designed to do a century ago, which was to educate a small population of kids to go on to college. But now we’re asking high schools to educate everyone.”
Students are still expected to march in lockstep through a series of prescribed courses that have little relevance to their lives, the study said. But little attention has been paid to preparing a student to take on the responsibilities of adulthood.
Liberal education reformers such as Ted Sizer think that the current high school is broken. High school graduation rates in many urban areas continue to be dismal. In Providence, more than 27 percent of freshmen who begin high school do not complete it four years later.
One of the biggest reasons students leave school is because there isn’t one adult in the building who cares about how they are doing, who checks in with them about their day and asks what’s going on at home, according to Sizer and other small-school advocates. High schools continue to operate like factories and, as a result, students wind up feeling like so many nameless cogs in a wheel.
Three years ago, McWalters and the Board of Regents for Elementary and Secondary Education decided to do something about that. As part of a series of sweeping high school reforms, they asked every district to find ways of getting adults to connect with their students.
Some high schools, including Hope, have created advisories, one class period a week where about 15 students spend meaningful time talking with a teacher-adviser. Each adviser is now responsible for helping a group of students complete Individual Learning Plans.
Half of the plan asks students to identify their academic goals, the courses that they must take to graduate. The other half, the I- PASS, deals with the emotional and social development that high schools have all too often ignored.
I-PASS stands for Individual, Physical, Academic, Social, Success Plan. Diane West, a guidance counselor at Hope, came up with the acronym as she was pondering what kind of skills would prepare a graduate to be successful in the adult world.
On the flip side of the form, the I-PASS offers suggestions on how students can satisfy each of the broad goals. Under physical goals, a student can decide to join a school team, eat a balanced breakfast, or walk from Kennedy Plaza downtown to Hope, which is on the East Side.
On the career side, a teenager might attend a college open house, shadow a professional, or visit a college campus. And on the social side, a student might volunteer in the community, join a club, or develop a respect for cultural differences.
“WE’RE TALKING about the whole child here,” West says. “Many of these kids don’t have someone at home to help them join a club or lose weight or plan for college. This plan addresses those things.”
As West was brainstorming the I-PASS, she decided to run it by a group of seniors to see if the language made sense to them. In some places, it didn’t, so West and the students worked on the wording together. One young man, Lavander Sanders, suggested adding a line that says students should respect other people’s neighborhood friends, or “crew.”
Last week, several seniors discussed the value of taking time out from their hectic lives to think about their future, academic and otherwise.
“It’s so easy to get caught up in the negative things,” Caroline Flowers, a senior, says. “This helps us to focus on the positives.”
“It will help kids stay on track,” says Tyandra Roderick, another senior. “I want to go up to freshmen and say, ‘Don’t worry so much about the social stuff.’ I wish I had started thinking about college a lot earlier.”
Flowers wishes that someone had given her class a map for its future four years ago.
“The freshmen and sophomores are so lucky,” she says. “The whole school is like a team now. It’s like all five fingers making a big fist.”
The I-PASS is very much a work in progress, however. Scott Sutherland, one of three principals who run the school’s three academies, presented the plan to the faculty for the first time Feb. 1. Now teachers, during their weekly advisories, are explaining it to their students.
Every student will receive a new learning plan at the beginning of the school year. Parents will be invited to review their child’s goals this month, and then the guidance counselor will sign off on them. In June, the student will be asked to reflect on what he or she has accomplished and begin thinking about fresh goals for the following year.
Each of Hope’s approximately 1,200 students is expected to complete an I-PASS by the end of this week. As the semester continues, each adviser will check in with his or her students to see whether they are staying on track.
“This is very big,” Donohue says. “But the important thing is not getting kids to fill out a form. It’s about building a school culture that’s thoughtful and organized and strategic about kids’ futures.”
The final bell rings, and Mahone’s students jump up from their desks and head for the doors. The hallway fills with the sounds of teenage chatter and boots clumping up the stairs.
Mahone, who used to teach at the state’s Met High School, in Providence, which piloted a personal approach to learning, says the Individual Learning Plan has helped him think more deeply about how to help students become not only successful students but successful adults.
“Society is not on their side,” Mahone says. “These kids have to fight for what they want. There aren’t always going to be people like me to hold their hands.”
The way Mahone sees it, schools do teenagers a disservice if they concentrate on what’s going on inside the student’s brain without attending to the student’s emotional, social and physical well- being.
“We should be talking about gangs and dating and life goals,” he says. “This is about how students become adults.”
lborg@projo.com / (401) 277-7823
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Learning plans are required by Rhode Island law
In 2003, the state Board of Regents for Elementary and Secondary Education announced a new high school diploma system. Starting with the class of 2008, seniors will have to prove that they have mastered certain skills.
The Individual Learning Plan is part of the state’s new high school regulations. Here’s a snapshot of what some schools are doing.
In North Providence, a guidance counselor sits down with each student to develop a personal learning plan, which includes his or her academic, social and emotional goals based on the student’s grade. The same guidance counselor stays with the same class for four years.
In Cranston High School East, the student’s civic and social goals are included on an electronic portfolio, a compilation not only of the teenager’s academic work but his involvement in sports and club activities and volunteer efforts in the community. The student’s academic goals are set during conversations with a guidance counselor, but this piece will be added to the portfolio next year.
At Ponaganset High School, in Glocester, students and parents meet with guidance counselors during the summer to develop two and four-year career goals. The plan, modeled after one in Marblehead, Mass., is being piloted this year and will be adopted by the entire high school next fall. The social and emotional goals are being discussed in the advisories.
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Hope High teacher Jon Mahone talks to a class about writing a plan for their lives. “This is about how students become adults,” he says.
JOURNAL PHOTO / MARY MURPHY
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Hope High School teacher Jon Mahone tells students in his advisory class: “What we’re talking about today is some small goals we can set on the physical level, the social, even the spiritual. I want you guys to make this your own, to make this personal.”
JOURNAL PHOTOS / MARY MURPHY
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Mark DeBritto, a freshman at Hope, works on his I-PASS, a plan that lists his academic, social and emotional goals.
JOURNAL PHOTOS / MARY MURPHY
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Senior Angelo Biossa meets with Mahone. Society, he says, is not on his students’ side. “These kids have to fight for what they want. There aren’t always going to be people like me to hold their hands.”
JOURNAL PHOTOS / MARY MURPHY