Community-Connected Learning - Jobs for the Future - Company Profile - Industry Overview

School Administrator, August, 2000 by Adria Steinberg

Since the workshops began in 1995, nearly 40 percent of the teaching force (more than 200 teachers) have participated in institutes and received coaching in project-based learning. Professional development achieved the focus and scale necessary for systemic impact.

What is particularly instructive is the way bottom-up has met top-down reform in the redesign of high schools in North Clackamas. As a result of their work in project-based learning, several teachers began a small interdisciplinary program for 9th and 10th graders in one of the high schools.

Inspired by the success of that model in improving student attendance and grades and informed by the state guidelines for reorganizing the upper grades into focused programs of study around broad career themes (for example, arts and communications, health services, business and management, human resources and natural resource systems), all three high schools now are carrying out whole-school redesign. The teachers who participated in the cadres are playing a leadership role in this process. From their experience creating contextualized learning projects for their own classrooms they have a concrete sense of what it takes to design career majors and to integrate interdisciplinary and career-related learning experiences into academic courses.

This fall North Clackamas will start focused programs of study for the class of 2002. It will take several years to phase in career-related learning experiences for all of these students. To make this possible, the district is part of a regional approach to employer recruitment, sharing a computerized database of 3,000 employers with 30 nearby school districts. The Oregon Business Council, the Business Education Compact and the North Clackamas Chamber of Commerce help to mobilize business support for the redesign efforts.

Looking Onward

As the North Clackamas story illustrates, school reform involves not only schoolbased changes, but also fundamental shifts in the relationship of the district office to the schools and of the schools to other institutions and organizations in the community. To be sustained, reform must be systemic, altering how schools are organized and how major systems--schools, employers, community-based organizations and government agencies--interrelate.

Based on lessons from pioneering communities, it is tempting to want to draw up a blueprint for how to create a community-connected learning system. The most important thing, however, is for a community to take advantage of its own particular combination of strengths and assets in addressing the needs of its young people. In a small suburban community, such as North Clackamas, it is possible for professional development in project-based learning to achieve the focus and scale necessary for systemic impact.

In a larger, urban district, with many competing constituencies, the starting point might be quite different. In Boston, for example, a compact among community partners to improve the education and economic opportunities for young people--a Private Industry Council with a strong strategic vision and staff capacity to serve as an intermediary between schools and employers-- and the entrepreneurial savvy of the school-to-career director have been the essential ingredients in moving an agenda of community-connected learning.