Secrets of one of America's best high schools

ASEE Prism, Sep 1999 by Herbert, Wray

The innovative curriculum at Montgomery Blair gives students an edge in science and technology careers.

It's 7:55 on a sticky June morning, and the students in Jonetta Russell's research class are already at work. One by one the 17 juniors describe for the class the projects they will be working on during the summer ahead. Most of the precocious teenagers have secured internships at one of the many blue-chip scientific institutions in the vicinity of Silver Spring, Maryland, where Montgomery Blair High School is located, and the range of disciplines is impressive: nuclear medicine, superconductors, neuropsychology.

But Russell's focus is less on the scientific details of the projects and more on other matters. When Albert Mao describes his work calibrating a new PET scanner at the National Institutes of Health, for example, Russell sidesteps the advanced algorithms he'll be working with. Instead, she takes his presentation as an opportunity to discuss the culture of a scientific laboratory, and how technicians and post-docs fit into the hierarchy. "You need to become acquainted with the language of the laboratory," she tells the class. When Navin Bhutani describes his internship at the Army Research Laboratory, working on wartime communications systems for Humvees, Russell brings the discussion around to the broader, civilian applications of specialized military research. All the while, she is pushing her obviously very bright proteges to clarify their thinking and their presentations, to be more precise in their use of language to describe their highly technical plans and accomplish ments.

If history is any guide, one of these students-and perhaps more than one-will go on to garner national recognition in one of the many science and mathematics competitions in the year ahead. Last year, six students from the program-known officially as the Science, Mathematics, Computer Science Magnet Program-were among the 40 finalists in the prestigious Intel Science Talent Search, known as the Nobels of secondary school science. Montgomery Blair was the only Maryland school to place a finalist. Over the decade since the program has been eligible to compete, it has consistently been in the handful of top schools in the country, and it is the only school in the history of the competition to have three top-10 winners in one year.

Blair magnet students regularly bring home honors from other competitions as well, including the International Mathematics Olympiad, the Continental Mathematics League, and the International Computer Problem Solving Competition. Five Blair students recently won the Department of Energy National Science Bowl-and with it the opportunity to travel to Australia to mix and discuss scientific advances with the world's top scientists. The list goes on.

So how do they do it? It's not simply that the program attracts the brightest and most highly motivated science and math students from around the county, though this is no doubt true (there are 800 applications for the 100 coveted slots in the magnet's entering class). But such selectivity is typical of most science and math magnets around the nation, and few are as competitive as Blair year in and year out. An examination of Blair's history and philosophy, and the way that philosophy is put into practice in classrooms like Jonetta Russell's, suggests less obvious reasons for the program's excellence-practices and attitudes that might be exploited by other science and math programs. For example:

Thinking vs. content. The projects that Russell's juniors were describing will become the crowning achievement of their four years at Blair. Beginning in their freshman year, all students are taught to focus less on memorizable content and more on the skills that make up good science-identifying problems, critical thinking, rigorous self-evaluation. Says Eileen Steinkraus, coordinator of the magnet program: "It used to be that you learned a body of knowledge and you were an educated person. Well, that's not true anymore. Today you need to learn how to learn, how to solve problems. The easiest thing to do is say, 'Memorize this information and give it back to us.' But that's not learning how to think."

She concedes that it's often a major adjustment for incoming students, because they're used to a certain kind of homework and classwork and they find that none of the old rules apply. "They have to learn that there may be no right answer, or that there are four or five right answers. It's frustrating for them, but it's a creative frustration." To ease this transition, Steinkraus says, the program deliberately enlists faculty members who are themselves comfortable with the ambiguity of the scientific process, who are comfortable with not knowing the correct answer, or even with being wrong. Which is not to say that the students ignore content entirely. They don't. But even course content is organized differently. The idea is that the world is not broken down into tidy categories, so the curriculum ought not be either. So freshmen may learn a concept from physics-the structure of the atom, for instance-then build on that knowledge the next year by studying organic chemistry, followed by the chemical nature of the universe in junior year earth science and, finally, the biosphere in senior year biology class. To underscore this intermingling of disciplines, teachers routinely visit and participate in other teachers' classes, and students keep a single detailed journal of their progress-rather than the traditional binders for biology, chemistry, earth science, and so forth.