Teaching Cleveland has worked with a number of Hawken educators since Teaching Cleveland began its Teaching Cleveland Institute (TCI) years ago. At the time, Hawken educators were looking to connect their students deeply to the Greater Cleveland community. As another new effort to continue that community connection, Hawken in the fall of 2020 recently opened their new Mastery School. Read more about its innovative approach to education which also features work with community partners.
The following captures a conversation with Julia Griffin, director of the Mastery School of Hawken.
What is the Hawken Mastery School primarily all about? How does it differ from traditional learning environments?
Despite the best efforts of dedicated teachers and administrators, it’s impossible to deny that today’s schools were built for yesterday’s world.
Unlike the current educational model, which is designed to sort and rank students along an assembly line model, at the Mastery School we’ve redesigned the systems of school around individual growth. The Mastery School of Hawken is designed to help students discover their strengths, master challenging concepts, chart their personal paths, and develop their best strategies for growth. Students learn real academic content, skills, and habits while engaging in real-world challenges for community partners who need help solving authentic problems they’re truly facing.
Instead of grades, we use Mastery Credits that students earn through presenting evidence that demonstrates their skills, knowledge, and abilities.
How does Hawken’s Mastery School prepare its teachers to guide their students in learning about their community?
Our approach uses methods developed by Doris Korda, a master teacher who has developed a radically different methodology for teaching that’s centered on students learning academic skills, knowledge and habits while they work on solving real problems in their communities. She and her team at the Korda Institute for Teaching have trained our teachers in her methods, which are rooted in cognitive science and have been honed over years of working with students and teachers all over the world.
In addition, we’ve engaged in a strategic effort to build meaningful relationships through convening a Community Advisory Board. This team of local leaders serve as our compass and we are deeply grateful for their counsel on how to join the community as a good neighbor. The CAB includes representatives of the following organizations:
· Cleveland Neighborhood Progress
· Famicos Foundation
· Mary Bethune K-8 School
· Mt. Zion Congregational Church
· Squire Patton Boggs
· Third Space Action Lab
· Twelve Literary Arts
· University Circle Incorporated
How do students engage in their real-world learning experiences? Do you have some examples of projects and/or work that Hawken students have done with community partners? (and any images?)
A large portion of the day at the Mastery School is devoted to what we call Macros, which put students in real-world contexts where they work alongside their classmates in teams to solve actual challenges that organizations in the community are facing. These experiences account for more than half of their schedules and are designed to help them develop the creative problem-solving skills so critical to professional success today.
From our course catalog, the Macros for 2020-21 include:
Ethics and Technology
Technology moves fast. It wasn’t too long ago that things like self-driving cars, artificial intelligence, and genetically modified animals were subjects for science fiction. Now you can buy a self-driving Tesla online, your social media feed is curated by machine learning algorithms, and we’re growing meat in a lab that you can buy off the shelf at a store. It makes you wonder, “What can we do next?!”… but maybe that’s the wrong question. In this class, we’ll explore ethical challenges in technology and try to figure out what we should do next.
Reinvention
We live in a continuously evolving world where the pace of change is ever accelerating. Globalization, technological advancements, a changing natural world, social and political revolutions – these all constantly reshape the environment in which we live and work. While this reality is often painted in a light of doom and gloom, it also offers us a chance for rebirth and an opportunity to make things better than they were. How can we structure our industries and institutions to endure and thrive in an unpredictable future?
Movement and Belonging
We feel good when we feel a sense of belonging. In fact, this is critical to human development and, for many of us, belonging is the driving force for the decisions we make about who we are, how we express that, and why that matters to us. Throughout history, and for various reasons, groups of people have moved around. How does movement impact our sense of belonging and group identities? What happens when we don’t feel like we belong?
Talking to Strangers
Most people spend most of their time talking to people they already know. In this class, we’re going to talk to people we don’t know, and see what happens. They might surprise us with how much we have in common, frustrate us with some important differences, or confuse us with a completely different perspective. We’re going to overcome that reluctance that most of us have to engage with people we don’t know, we’ll get past that awkward phase, and we will learn how to forge real connections with lots of different people – people none of us have met yet.
Challenges students have worked on so far just this year include:
· Helping the Rust Belt Riders develop a plan to make composting ubiquitous throughout Cuyahoga County
· Working with the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections to design COVID-friendly polling places in advance of the November 2020 elections
· Helping an architecture firm in Ohio City create designs and plans to renovate historic homes keeping the history of the buildings in mind
Why did Hawken open its Mastery School campus in University Circle – so far away from its upper school campus in Gates Mills?
We’re a school that places real-world challenges at the heart of the academic program and that seeks to build a culture of engagement, activism, inclusion, and equity. The neighborhoods of University Circle and Glenville are the ideal spot! We’re thrilled that our students get to spend their days at the intersection of cultural treasures and community activists, in proximity to some of Cleveland’s most innovative artists, entrepreneurs, and scientists.
Fun fact: The Mastery School of Hawken is some 700 yards from Hawken’s original 1915 home on Ansel Road near what we now call University Circle. Not only does the Mastery School return us to our geographical roots, but it also extends our commitment to Mr. Hawken’s forward-focused vision of what school should be and do.
What have you learned so far about this kind of education?
We’ve learned that shifting paradigms is really hard…and it takes time to undergo the “deschooling” process that puts the focus on learning and growth, not grades.
We’ve learned that just as John Dewey said, the key to helping students learn isn’t tricking them into being interested in something, but rather capturing their natural curiosity and interest in learning.
We’ve learned the power of belonging and how crucial it is to create a space where everyone feels seen, heard, known and valued. A sense of belonging is a key prerequisite for the kind of risk taking and vulnerability that is needed for growth.
We’ve learned that young people are ready. They’re ready to be active in working on the big challenges that face our community, our city, and our planet, and they don’t want to wait. By placing real, unsolved problems for other people in the center of the academic learning experience, students get the chance to develop their creative problem-solving skills and grow in their ability to tackle a messy, unsolved problem. That’s the skill they’ll need for their futures, and for all our futures.
