New Haven Academy (NHA) is a small, progressive magnet high school serving approximately 250 students from the greater New Haven area. I teach Chemistry at NHA to high school juniors, but this coming academic year, I have been invited to create, direct and administer a new course for the school entitled "The Design Process." I have been invited to do so during a time of great programmatic shifts for the both our school and the State of Connecticut. This unit on designing a Micro-Apartment was developed for this new course.
The New Haven Academy Science Department is undergoing a number of significant programmatic changes as well. Some changes are a result of the shift in educational philosophy nationally, some due to the adaptation of The Common Core by the State of Connecticut and other changes are encouraged by the reform movement within the City of New Haven. The State of Connecticut is poised to shift away from its old set of science standards to a new national set of science standards entitled the Next Generation of Science Standards (NGSS). The NGSS seeks to integrate a great many concepts in science that, until now, have been taught in modular isolation and to include engineering principles in traditional science instruction. It focuses on a smaller set of Disciplinary Core Ideas encouraging depth (not breadth) of topics and application of content. The NGSS is designed to encourage students to consider science concepts in the context of real world application instead of in topical isolation. The NGSS seeks to accomplish this with an appreciation of how science and engineering is practiced in the real world.
In as much as our school is aware of these shifts at the federal and state levels, New Haven Academy has always endeavored to be an engine of innovation and a catalyst for change. Our school chooses to be on the leading edge of school reform through its focus on curriculum development rather than follow.
This unit was born from a union of interests, needs and inspirations. New Haven Academy is concurrently making the shift to Mastery Based Learning which seeks to achieve thoughtful learning through questioning, researching and presenting. The identified need for an elective course that focused on the design process was the result of discussions held with my colleagues. In its shift from a traditional form of instruction and assessment to Mastery Based Learning, or Competency Based Learning, students take greater responsibility for their learning. In a Mastery Based Learning model the student applies content knowledge skills in and/or across content areas. Students clear formative benchmarks that contribute to approximately 10% of their grade leading to a key summative assignment which constitutes 90% of their grade. Students are not permitted to move forward in their coursework (or on to other courses) until they demonstrate mastery on a key summative assignment designed to assess competency of a content skill.
Whatever the merits or flaws of this system, there are two important practical considerations: 1. Mastery Based Learning is the direction that the New Haven Public School System (and the State of Connecticut) is headed toward. 2. A leap from a traditional model to a mastery based model is no small challenge. New Haven's High School in the Community serves as an apt illustration of this. It is the first school in New Haven to institute a form of this model. At the conclusion of the last academic year the headline from our local online newspaper gives some indication of the results: Zero Out of 44 Students Complete Freshman Year by Melissa Bailey (June 28, 2013), The New Haven Independent (www.newhavenindependent.org). It is in the context of these reform movements, shifting educational landscape, and within the progressive crucible of New Haven Academy that this unit was developed.
