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December 16, 2019 - March 14, 2020
To me, Isabella embodies what all kids want—to be able to live the life they want to live. To be happy, successful, and true to themselves.
Like all kids I know, Isabella wanted an opportunity—not someone to save her.
In the 1950s, the top skills employers wanted were: 1) the ability to work rapidly and for long periods of time, 2) memory for details and directions, and 3) arithmetic computation.2 But according to Forbes, the employees of 2020 need: 1) complex problem solving, 2) critical thinking, 3) creativity, 4) people management, 5) coordinating with others, and 6) emotional intelligence. Employers want innovative thinking, independence, initiative.3 These were not coveted skills in our grandparents’ time.
Between 1949 and 1969, the real median family income grew by almost 100 percent.4 For years, kids grew up to do better than their parents. Today it’s an expectation. We dream very different dreams today than we did seventy years ago, because we can—and that’s something to celebrate.
The factory job and home ownership aren’t enough anymore. Now we want work that’s meaningful, so we spend our days doing things that matter to us and that we like. We want to live longer, and to be healthier and more active along the way. We want close relationships with people we care about. We want to be a part of communities with people who understand and accept us. We don’t want to trade off financial stability—no one wants to take a vow of poverty in order to be fulfilled—but we’ve come to think we shouldn’t have to choose, that we should be able to have both.
We showed that if you change the way you look at education, you can both prepare kids for admission to college, and prepare them for a good life. It is both revelatory and common sense: you actually don’t have to trade one for the other.
What we have done is take everything we collectively know about what it takes to develop whole, healthy human beings in our society today and put it all together in a coherent approach that actually works. I guess if there is any secret sauce to Summit, that is it.
We’re practicing staying focused when there are interruptions and obstacles, so talking to you is good for us.”
Students learn information about a subject through “units” like “The Industrial Revolution” and “The Life Cycle of Plants.” Units are made up of lectures, and the students take notes, read textbooks, and respond to questions or solve math problems. The unit might include film clips or presentations with more notes, followed by teacher-led discussions and reviews of the questions, and ultimately a multiple-choice or short-answer final test. Sometimes an essay is assigned. There are quizzes along the way, lots of homework, and students are expected to make flash cards and study. It all
Great teachers work hard to make their lectures entertaining and to include small-group work. Science teachers offer labs, and English and history teachers assign papers. Sometimes a teacher will assign a final project, but for the most part, these are the dessert, not the main course, and generally only happen a few times a year.
Sometimes a teacher will assign a final project, but for the most part, these are the dessert, not the main course, and generally only happen a few times a year.
Well-designed projects are the most effective learning approach to achieving this goal, so this is how we’ve organized everyday learning.
The final products are high-quality presentations, models, simulations, websites, campaigns, building plans, and businesses. Projects aren’t dessert—they’re the main course.
the purpose of standardized tests is to show how students perform and how prepared they are, and yet these tests get in the way of the best way to prepare them. Even more ironic is the fact that PBL kids do well on standardized tests.
Daniel Pink’s bestselling Drive was one of the books on our bookshelf, as it shared research pointing to mastery, autonomy, and purpose as the underpinnings of motivation. Simply put, mastery is when you become good at something, autonomy is when you have some measure of control, and purpose is when you’re doing something for a reason that is authentic to you.
as a first step, Summit students set a goal that’s rooted in a sense of purpose. It might be something like using evidence to support an argumentative claim, or managing their time so they won’t cram to complete a three-week project the night before it’s due. Then they make a plan for how they’re going to reach that goal. Next is the implementation of that plan—this is the part where they learn/do. As they work, they check in with themselves and their mentor, making sure they’re on track and employing self-directed behaviors as needed. They may need to shift their strategy, find appropriate
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Those five behaviors are strategy-shifting, challenge-seeking, persistence, responding to setbacks, and appropriate help-seeking. Ms.
While the basic idea of learning from failure is supported by evidence, the sink-or-swim method doesn’t really work. Failing is only productive when two things are true: first, the person who fails actually learns something from it and is thus motivated to try again; and second, the failure doesn’t permanently close future doors.
He had realized it didn’t matter, and so he tested and retested, figuring out as he did where to cut next. His approach was methodical and strategic, and really fast. Unencumbered by the fear of failure, he could progress through the game rapidly, getting better with each attempt, incorporating as much learning from the misses as the successes.
The fact is, when kids are self-directed, the role of the parent changes.
The bottom line is: Scott and I, like all parents, like being needed by our child. As Rett began to access the tools and build the skills to direct his own learning, it completely changed our role. It felt uncomfortable that he knew more than we did. But it was the best way to prepare him, and in time, we would figure out our new place, too.
A huge part of the mentor’s role is to do what Adam and Angelica did with Max: to ask questions that provoke the mentee to reflect on what they want, who they are, what they care about, how they feel, and, ultimately, what they should do as a result—not because someone told them to do it, but because it is an authentic choice for them.
Mentor is a role we should be well equipped to play as parents. We hope that we are trusted by our kids.
Something I am constantly working on with Rett is my ability to set my emotion and myself aside, so I can simply be there for him.
Exxtremely important to follow as a parents
At my best I can listen, ask genuine questions, and help him to see his own logic and emotion in a situation.
It is human to disagree, to become angry, to get hurt, and to hurt others. It is healthy to learn how to repair relationship ruptures, so they don’t escalate to a point of no return, but instead relationships become stronger from the process of healing the break.
By asking him to focus on his “ings,” his mentor was helping David to figure out all of the little interests that are unique to him that ultimately add up to who he is and what he cares about, which can lead him to understanding the type of work that will be purposeful and meaningful to him.
I never ask, “What do you want to be?” or “What is your favorite subject?” Rather, I ask, “What do you like doing?” “What parts of that do you like most?” And in the course of our conversation we come up with a list of what we call the “ing” words.
It’s easy to come to consensus when everyone is going along to get along, but without a structure for efficient decision-making, the second there’s disagreement it falls apart.
using the STP process—“identify the status,” “define the target,” and “develop the proposal”—that we used with the mascot selection,
The most successful collaborators know themselves. They know who they are, what they care about, what they know, and what they don’t know. Knowing themselves comes from being reflective. Successful collaborators know their strengths and what they are working to improve, and they know what they can contribute.
I’ve been asking myself the same three questions every day since I started Summit. Is Summit the school I wish I had attended? Is Summit the school where I would want to teach? Is Summit the school I want to send my own child to?
Habits of success, curiosity-driven knowledge, universal skills, and concrete next steps are the measurable outcomes that matter most if we want our kids to be prepared for a good life.
teachers doing more couldn’t be our answer. Instead we had to figure out how to enable kids to do for themselves. It turns out that meant we needed to value developing the habits of success as much as we valued developing academic skills and knowledge.
He wanted his teachers to bubble in the F so he could just go play video games. That was the easier, familiar path. But we collectively wrapped our arms around him instead, and it worked. Though it wasn’t easy, and at some moments it was messy, he did graduate from Summit.
The building block of a growth mindset, or the belief your talents can be developed, is also critical to the self-directed cycle.
So imagine a kid who practiced setting a goal, making a plan, executing it, showing what he knew, and reflecting (the self-directed cycle) a ton of times over his life, in school or at home.
The biggest problem was, I had never really asked.
A good teacher inspires, captivates, and gets kids to think by sharing profound knowledge and perfectly crafted questions. A bad teacher is boring and so the information she presents seems irrelevant and meaningless. However, in both cases, the teacher presents knowledge for the consumption of the students. The message to the teacher is: “To be good at your job, present knowledge—just do it in an entertaining and captivating way.”
Those who had background knowledge about baseball scored higher, regardless of whether they’d been considered poor or good readers beforehand.2 What this and other studies like it tell us is, if we want our kids to be good at valuable skills like critical thinking, they need to know and understand the stuff they are critically thinking about.
my child will learn more and perform better in school if he has a lot of knowledge to begin with.
The top three blocks in the habits of success are self-direction, curiosity, and sense of purpose. This is because as we think about adolescents moving into adulthood, we shift responsibility to them for their own learning and growth. Learning begins with curiosity. When a person genuinely has a question, the next logical thing to do is to seek an answer to it.
when we enable kids to follow their curiosities and interests, they learn much more. As they learn much more, they get better at learning. It becomes a virtuous cycle.
Brody’s “sparks” required two things: time and access. The absence of either would have blocked his pursuit. And yet, we block time and access all the time without really thinking about it.
The object of his time invested in maps is not to define a career or even a major, the object is to learn how to learn by following his curiosity, and to figure out who he is and what he’s interested in—the “ings”—along the way.
very few find something they know they love and follow it so early on. Most people have to be exposed to a really wide variety of subjects and often explore a multitude of dead ends before they find something they want to pursue. The benefit of this process? They’re learning all along.
when we confuse acceptance to a school or a job with preparedness for them, we miss the mark. When we prepare for not a specific school or job, but for the life we want, we tend to get both acceptance and fulfillment. We don’t have to compromise.
the American Academy of Pediatrics revised their recommendations for screen time in 2016, but this change is not well known. They no longer recommend specific limits to the amount of screen time kids six and older should have each day. Rather, they recommend each family create a media-use plan that designates media-free times (such as dinner) and locations (such as bedrooms), as well as defining reasonable limits to use so sleep, exercise, and social activity aren’t replaced by screen time.5 Parents can also play a huge role in modeling what it means to be curious, explore, and learn online.
If we can’t answer “why” questions because we don’t know, then it’s an invitation to codiscover and get curious with our kids, often by using our devices to access the Internet.
