Innovation – Thoughts Between Class

(Re)

This spring I was invited to the American School of Rio de Janeiro to talk at the annual Association of American Schools in South America educators’ conference. I’ve spent a considerable portion of my career working overseas, including 10 years at Graded School in Sao Paulo, Brazil. I actually helped to plan this very conference twice when it was held on our campus. I was delighted to come back and share with my former colleagues.

The theme of the conference was (Re). Its focus was on innovation — on revisioning education for the 21st Century. As a relatively young school with impactful technology integration, Cary Academy has a strong reputation in this space. The focus of my keynote, however, was not about technology. It was about culture.

The more I think about the challenges ahead, the more I am convinced that we need to have school cultures that model the mindsets and behaviors that we want to instill in our students. Cary Academy has lived this part of its mission since the school’s founding, but as the world continues to change we’ve had to double-down on our efforts. This is why the first two parts of our current strategic plan focus on institutional flexibility and authentic engagement. The further we move into this work, the stronger I feel that we are on the right path.

Three Things
As such, the school gave me a rich set of experiences to illustrate my point. In fact, most of my message was conveyed through story. Here’s one:

Earlier this semester, I was out in Silicon Valley meeting with one of our more entrepreneurial alums. He had sold his startup and had been asked to stay on as CEO and help the new owners manage the spectacular growth of the firm. He spends most of his time hiring and trying to manage the culture of the organization. Curious, I asked him what he looks for in new employees.

Without skipping a beat, he said people who are:

smart,
nice,
and get things done.

I love this. There are a lot of people studying the skills needed for the future workforce, and you can find many outstanding (and often dense) lists. In addition to its brevity, what I also loved about this take was how it challenges us in schools.

You expect your good schools to develop intellect. You want your outstanding schools to nurture character. Too often, though, I think schools get too wrapped up in measuring student success as the ability to follow directions and meet deadlines. Former Yale professor William Deresiewicz decried this mindset and said that what these schools produce are excellent sheep.

What this third point really means is that the companies of the 21st century need employees who can operate when things are ambiguous and who will ask their own questions and work together to find solutions. As Harvard’s Tony Wagner has said: The innovation economy requires us to help students go from problem solvers to problem seekers.

Often times, this mindset is nurtured through problem- and project-based learning in the classroom and involvement in athletics, arts, and school activities. For our young CA alum, this particular mindset was honed through his involvement in a school club that developed web sites for local businesses. There are countless other stories that illustrate the power of such experiential learning.

School culture is important because it is the living manifestation of our real beliefs, not just what we put on a website or brochure. We all learn behavior and adopt mindsets by watching those around us in action. Students spend a lot of time in school, and therefore it is imperative that they see the adults in school embrace change and learn from setbacks too. In the language of design thinking, this is called a bias towards action.

It was a joy to share some of the exciting things happening at Cary Academy with colleagues from around the world.

The R&D behind Blended Learning

We’ve got a guest blogger for this month’s newsletter entry. Below is an article written for publication by Cary Academy’s Dean of Faculty Martina Greene. She was asked to contribute a chapter to the recent Future Forwards book from the American School of Bombay’s Research and Development Team. This piece will provide insight into the development of Cary Academy’s blended learning courses, and it is also serving as a template for future R&D projects at CA. This fall, our Director of Technology and Innovation Karen McKenzie has launched our own R&D team as part of the CA Strategic Plan.

Mike Ehrhardt,
Head of School

Blazing the Trail for Blended Learning:
The Cary Academy Blended Learning Development Team

by Martina Greene, CA Dean of Faculty

The blended learning model is rich with potential to transform teaching and learning, but how does a school prepare faculty to design and implement blended courses and assess the impact of these courses on students? At Cary Academy, we decided to take a collaborative approach to the process by creating and funding a Blended Learning Development Team. This chapter will describe how we engaged this faculty cohort in a year-long process of professional learning, course development and evaluation that resulted in the successful implementation of seven new blended learning courses in our Upper School.

From an individual to an organizational approach
Our first venture into blended learning came in 2011, when Cary Academy launched a summer grant program to support individual faculty members wanting to experiment with the blended format. While the grant program did result in the design and implementation of a couple of blended courses, it did not generate any broader interest in or momentum toward a larger scale implementation of the blended format at our school. In 2014, we decided to change tack, moving away from the isolated efforts brought forth by our individual grant program to a clearly-defined organizational effort rooted in the work of a collaborative group. The result was the launch of the Blended Learning Development Team.

Team objectives

The Blended Learning Development Team was established with three major objectives:

To design and implement a slate of high quality blended courses rooted in research-based promising practices and reflecting the mission of the school.
To identify core design principles for blended learning emerging from the implementation and evaluation of these courses.
To contribute to the creation of an online training course to support future blended course development.

Importantly, we did not select a specific model of blended learning at the outset for all team members to adopt. We instead gave team members the flexibility to experiment with a variety of blended structures and strategies, as long as those experiments were consistent with the following four defining aims of blended learning[1]:

A substantial proportion of the learning in the course (30-79%) takes place outside of the physical classroom in an online learning environment.
The face-to-face and online components of the course are tightly connected in an online platform to provide an integrated learning experience.
Learners experience increased control over the time, place, path and/or pace of their learning.
Learners experience enhanced opportunities for engagement with teacher, with peers, with content and with outside resources.

Choosing the courses to be developed
Teachers interested in becoming a part of the Blended Learning Development Team were invited to submit proposals describing how they hoped to use blended structures and strategies to better meet the needs of students in a given course. Seven proposals from a variety of content areas were ultimately accepted, each with a specific area of focus for leveraging the blended format:

Course	Focus
Calculus I and II (Advanced)	Using the blended format to support accelerated learning for talented and highly-motivated students.
Creative Writing	Using the blended format to enhance coaching and peer feedback in support of individual projects.
Environmental Science (Advanced)	Using the blended format to support student-directed project-based learning.
Great Books (Advanced)	Using the blended format to expand participation in discussions and to improve the quality of contributions to discussions.
Global Leadership	Using the blended format to facilitate team teaching and student collaboration involving multiple schools.
Music Theory (Advanced)	Using the blended format to give students choice in pathway and to support the creative use of music-specific technology tools.
Physics	Using the blended format to enable students to work at their own pace toward mastery of key concepts.

By creating a vehicle for pursuing these seven individual experiments within a team setting, we were able to generate an ongoing flow of ideas from which all members of the team could draw. In so doing, we were able to bring much-needed synergy to our school’s blended learning initiative.

Building the team

The Blended Learning Development Team began its work in June 2014 with a two-week program of collaborative course development centered on the creation and critique of a prototype module for each course. Cary Academy partnered with the Virtual High School Collaborative to create a set of training materials to support team members in the development of the online infrastructure for their courses. These materials addressed a variety of topics, including organization and learner support features, facilitation of online discussions, strategies for promoting online collaboration, and use of the virtual space for formative evaluation and feedback. We also arranged for faculty from North Carolina State University College of Education, the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation, the Virtual High School Collaborative, and the North Carolina Virtual Public High School to help review the course modules created. Team members then spent the remainder of the summer using their vetted prototype units as models for building out the rest of their courses. The team’s work continued during the academic year with biweekly meetings focused on idea sharing and problem solving, review of student feedback, group tuning of course modules, and identification of emerging design principles and best practices.

Course evaluation model
Course evaluation was from the beginning a key component of the vision for the Blended Learning Development Team. To that end, Cary Academy partnered with two research scholars from the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation to help us assess the impact of our blended courses upon student learning through development and implementation of a formal course review protocol. The researchers began by working with the team to develop a set of indicators for effective blended learning informed by a review of relevant literature, existing standards for blended and online learning, and the specific goals of team members. From there, the researchers helped the team create two student surveys, one given at the beginning of the year to capture student perceptions of blended learning entering into the courses, and one more in-depth survey toward the end of the year to capture student perceptions of their experiences in the blended courses. Our research partners also conducted a mid-year student focus group with a mix of students from all seven courses to collect feedback and recommendations for improving various elements of the courses. To round out the process, the researchers conducted two teacher interviews, one at the beginning of the year to register the teacher’s initial approach to course development, and a second interview at mid-year to document changes the teacher made to the course and to capture emerging best practices from the teacher’s perspective.
General outcomes
The table below shows some of the general outcomes of our blended learning initiative captured in survey data collected from the 139 students enrolled in blended courses in 2014-15:

blendedchart1

Students clearly felt that the blended format gave them greater control over the time and place of their learning, with 88% of students reporting that their blended course was either better or much better in that regard. Students also felt that they had greater opportunities to interact and collaborate with peers in the blended format, with two-thirds of students reporting improvement over a traditional course. In addition, the majority of students indicated that they experienced greater flexibility to explore their own areas of interest and greater choice in how they demonstrated their learning. Nearly half the students saw improvement in opportunities to interact with the teacher as well, but it should be noted that this perception varied significantly from course to course and even within some of the courses. When it came to opportunities to interact with experts outside of the Cary Academy community, however, 70% of students found no improvement with the blended format. Those students who did report improvement in that area were mostly in the Global Leadership and Advanced Environmental Science courses.

The power of the digital platform
The qualitative data we collected from teachers and students also provided a number of interesting insights into the effectiveness of our blended learning initiative, starting with the power of the electronic infrastructure that team members worked so hard to design for their courses during the summer institute. As expected, in the absence of daily face-to-face contact with the teacher or with fellow students, the digital platform became the nexus for information-sharing and management of the learning process. Students reported much greater use of communication features like announcements, private messages, chat and discussion boards in their blended courses than in traditional courses operating with the same learning management system. Perhaps even more significantly, the digital platform also served to demystify the blended format for our community by capturing the learning that took place in our blended courses in highly visible ways. In each of our blended courses, one can easily see the engagement of the students with the subject matter, the individual and collaborative work produced by students in the effort to attain mastery, and the feedback sought and given—all preserved within the digital learning space. We hope that the success of our Blended Learning Development Team in leveraging the tools within our learning management system to facilitate meaningful communication and collaboration and to document student learning will inspire fuller utilization of the system’s features in our traditional courses, as well.

A positive shift in student culture
Conversations with teachers and students also revealed an important shift in student culture arising from our blended learning courses. The teacher group in particular reported that students no longer seemed to view face-to-face class periods in the physical classroom as teacher-controlled time and space. As the students became accustomed to taking more responsibility for their own learning outside of the physical classroom environment, they started assuming more responsibility for the learning within the physical classroom, too. For example, rather than arriving in class and waiting for the teacher to introduce the lesson plan for the day, the students began coming to class and talking to the teacher about what they thought would be the best way to utilize the class meeting time. We are eager to see whether this increased sense of ownership among students of their learning time will carry over to other classes, even those that are not blended.

Fostering more thoughtful discussion
Blended course teachers noticed a similar trend toward greater student responsibility in class discussions. The blended format necessarily shifts a substantial amount of discussion from the face-to-face classroom environment to the virtual environment. One of the major benefits of an online discussion forum is that it captures a written record of a discussion, thus providing teachers with a means to engage students in some meta-analysis of what makes a good discussion and how they can contribute effectively to discussions. Several of our blended learning teachers worked with students to create detailed rubrics to guide student contributions to online discussions and help students evaluate their contributions. As students internalized the techniques of effective discussion in the online forum, teachers noted improvement in the quality of participation in face-to-face discussions as well. We believe that this is another success stemming from our blended learning initiative that will positively impact student performance in all class settings.

Students as co-creators of course content
The value of online discussion forums within the blended model was by no means limited to helping students improve their contributions to class conversations. Teachers also reported using discussion boards in combination with other social media tools to engage students in defining the direction of the course. Our environmental science teacher, for example, created a system for “crowdsourcing” course content by soliciting ideas from students through news discussion threads, green tweets, and student-generated mini-lessons posted to a blog. Each student in the course contributed to a weekly online discussion group by starting a discussion thread for an environmental news story that piqued his or her interest and by responding to at least one other thread started by someone else in the group. Students were also asked to scour Twitter for what they considered to be the most intriguing tweets on the environment and to retweet at least one of those tweets each week to the class. Last but not least, students were expected to work in groups to develop short lessons on environmental topics of interest, which were posted to a blog with opportunities for peers to comment. The discussion threads, tweets, and mini-lessons that resonated most with members of the class then became the topics for more in-depth exploration by the entire class through labs and project work. Evidence of the success of this effort to give students greater voice in the direction of their learning can be seen in the student survey data for this specific course. 73% of students in environmental science reported better or much better flexibility to explore their own areas of interest, 86% of students reported better or much better choice in how they applied their learning, and 93% of students reported better or much better connection to real world problems or contexts. These results were well above the already noteworthy outcomes in these areas for our blended courses across the board.

The value of self-paced learning
While all of our blended courses aimed to give students greater control over the time, place, path and pace of their learning, one course in particular stood out in providing students with a self-paced, mastery-based learning experience. The physics teacher used the Meteor platform to build a custom application called OpenLab to support student-driven learning rooted in a modeling approach. The OpenLab application enabled students to schedule and track themselves at their own pace through the collaborative and cyclical process of developing and deploying their models, while at the same time freeing the teacher to work with individuals or small groups to address specific learning needs as they arose. The course teacher reported that students in the blended physics course with OpenLab showed significant improvement in the Test of Understanding Graphs in Kinematics (TUG-K), moving from 28% to 75% when most high school students average only 40% upon completing an introductory physics course. This also marked the first time at Cary Academy that every student in the general physics course showed improvement. Although there is still much to be done to streamline and improve the OpenLab application, the initial results on an objective and standard assessment suggest that the increased student control over the pace of learning made possible by the blended format with OpenLab led to better mastery of core physics concepts. These results persuaded at least two other members of the Blended Learning Development Team to consider integrating the OpenLab application into their own blended courses as part of their own standards-based approach to teaching.

Next steps
Given the success of the Blended Learning Development Team in its first year, we decided to keep the team in place for a second year, with a focus on fine-tuning the courses created in year one based upon the results of the course evaluation data. We also invited faculty to submit additional proposals for blended courses to bring the total number of blended offerings to ten. Significantly, each of the new courses will include a focus on creating opportunities for students to interact with experts outside the Cary Academy community, an aspect of blended learning that we felt was not fully explored in our first year:

Course	Focus
Architecture	Using the blended format to create opportunities for students to apply their learning to real-world projects.
Calculus III (Advanced)	Using the blended format to supplement a university-based course.
Human Anatomy and Physiology	Using the blended format to facilitate the integration of outside experts and resources.

Conclusion
The courses created and implemented by members of the Blended Learning Development Team have proven to be vivid examples of the potential of the blended model to transform teaching and learning. The success and popularity of these classes has also generated the momentum we were seeking toward a larger scale implementation of the blended format. We expect blended learning to evolve from its current status as an experimental course structure to eventually become the norm for the creative and effective use of technology to enhance teaching and learning at our school. The Blended Learning Development Team has certainly helped us to blaze the trail in that direction.

[1] See Heather Staker and Michael B. Horn, Classifying K-12 Blended Learning (Innosight Institute, 2012).

State of the School

At the recent PTAA annual meeting, I shared some information regarding the State of the School. As has been our practice, we use this time to share highlights from the past year and look towards the future.

Any such presentation regarding Cary Academy must begin with the most important item: Our students continue excel inside and outside of the classroom. They are taking full advantage of the rich learning environment at CA through participation in extracurricular activities, athletics, and service projects. As we know from our own experiences, these opportunities allow for real-life skill development that serve as an essential complement to the good work happening in our classrooms.

The last year had many highlights:

A number of our Science Olympiad students placed in the top 10 in their respective events at the state tournament last April. Our mathematicians continued to represent themselves and CA well in state competitions at all levels. Our Varsity robotics program was profiled in the News and Observer this fall. Our MS Lego robotics had an extremely good showing in competition and just missed qualifying for the state tournament this December. Our JV FIRST Tech Challenge team qualified for the state tournament to be held later this winter. Finally, this fall, CA introduced a new researched-based science competition, sending a team to the USA Young Physics Tournament in Virginia at the end of January.
In 2014-2015, our athletic teams had their second best collective year ever, placing 4th (out of 21 schools) for the top overall program award — the Wells Fargo Cup — which was helped by state championships in boys swimming and boys tennis. This was on the heels of our best year at the state level in 2013-2014, where we bested all our Triangle rivals. This fall, our boys and girls Cross Country teams won state championships, and in between more teams than can easily be listed here took home TISAC championships and runners-up trophies at the state tournament. At the end of the fall season, Cary Academy sat in 5th place in the Wells Fargo cup.

Two highly successful theatrical productions held in our Black Box Theater, in the fall it was Metamorphoses for the US and winter A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the MS. The US also held its first joint performing arts presentation at Meymandi Concert Hall between the orchestra, band, and chorus.
On November 6th, 2016 we held a Celebration of Creativity and Innovation as part of our regular Grandparents Day. Students presented in the morning, a Speaker Series (featuring students and alumni guests as well) took place midday, and a series of hands-on art, athletic, music, and dance opportunities were available in the afternoon.
Students continue to excel in their commitment to the wider community, serving others individually, in clubs, and by grade level. Cary Academy employees held their second all-employee service day this fall, working with Stop Hunger Now. Among many other grade-level activities, the full community participated in our Community Service Day in honor of MLK by sorting coats for at the Salvation Army this January.
Cary Academy continued to play host to many groups coming from schools around the world, and this fall we hosted Dr. Peggy McIntosh, who spoke on the topic of diversity and inclusion to educators from around the state. For the second year in a row, CA students hosted their own educational conference, this time focusing on the “ideal educational program” with students from around the Triangle.

As an institution, Cary Academy continues to thrive. We measure the health of the organization in several ways:

Interest in what we offer. Our applications remain at the top-end of recent averages, and last year 88% of students offered a place at the school enrolled — well above peer school benchmarks. Our attrition rate last year was a remarkably small 3%.

Inclusive in our environment. Overall, students of color make up 32% of our enrollment and faculty of color are at 22%, again exceeding our peer school benchmark group.

Value for your tuition dollar. Cary Academy is debt free and a generous endowment supports 85% of our financial aid budget, allowing us to keep our tuition below our peer schools and allocate more of those dollars to support top-rate faculty and innovative programs.

Strong program performance indicators. This year, 89% of parents and past parents told us that they had a positive (22%) or very positive (67%) view of the school. Parents also are showing their support by making CA a top priority in their philanthropic giving. The Cary Academy Annual Fund has seen a remarkable 68% increase in the last two years, and this year’s effort will again set a new record. A huge thank you to the parent chairs the last three years: Greg and Liz Sanchez, John and Christa McElveen, and Jeff and Jill Wilson.
Student outcomes, as measured by standardized test scores, AP exams, and college admissions remain remarkably strong. We are particularly proud of our acceptance rates at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. In the past two years, CA has also had three alumni recognized by Forbes in their “30 under 30” publication — Philip DeSimone (‘07), Travis May (‘05), and Uzma Rawn (‘02).

A quick note on a few major initiatives:

Strategic Plan. We have begun the implementation of our newly approved strategic plan. A new website has debuted at http://blogs.caryacademy.org/CA2020. Initiatives for this year include:

establishing a shared language for innovation through the use of design thinking,
forming a cross-divisional schedule study team,
instituting a curriculum review cycle, starting with math, science, and health,
launching a Research and Development team,
auditing our external communications,
connecting with the internal and external communities through our creativity and innovation showcase; STEP Conference; Peggy McIntosh presentation,
conducting a successful feasibility study to assess financial support with the community for our strategic plan and our master facilities plans.

New student information system implementation. We have had started rollout of Veracross, which replaces our old system by Blackbaud and connects demographic, academic, and business functions.
We continue to move forward with the work identified by our master facilities planning process. We updated classroom furniture in 11 rooms this summer. We are planning a major update of our main chiller unit, as part of needed HVAC work. This summer, we expect to conduct a pilot renovation in the top floor of the US building, to test some new concepts for offices, classrooms, and collaboration spaces.

On a personal note, I am in the fortunate position of working regularly with employees, students, parents, alumni, and past parents. All I can say is: Wow. Those interactions never fail to leave me impressed and humbled. Cary Academy is a special place, and it is an honor to play my part in its wonderful story.

Structuring for Success

There is a tremendous amount of positive energy around the launch of our new strategic plan, and we have begun to pivot from the work of forming a compelling vision to fulfilling big goals.

The path from idea to execution can trip up many a well-intentioned strategic plan. The CA Leadership Team has been thinking hard about how we need to organize ourselves to get this important work done, and we’ve been informed by Clayton Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation and John Kotter’s work on change management.

We are organizing our thinking around three aspects of innovation — sustaining, disrupting, and diffusing — and calling this our superstructure. We’ve chosen to focus on the word innovation in part because it is one of the core components of our mission, but also because we believe that innovation captures the forward-thinking, entrepreneurial spirit of Cary Academy. We want our students to be prepared for today and have the tools to tackle unknown challenges in the future.

Our superstructure provides an organizational framework to hold ourselves accountable for different parts of the strategic plan. Below, I will break out each area of this superstructure in a bit more detail.

Sustaining innovation at Cary Academy means focusing on the core of what we are all about: excellent teaching and learning. This part of our superstructure can be thought of as a hierarchical approach to continual school improvement. We have a current system in place to get this work done, through our dean of faculty, our principals, and our department heads. We are now exploring the process of design thinking as shared language for developing ideas and solving problems. In our first year, a new sustaining innovation will be to launch our first-ever cross-divisional curriculum review cycle, starting with math, science, and health.

Disruptive innovation at Cary Academy means having a system to allow for smaller-scale research and development and the willpower to foster new ideas. This part of our superstructure can be thought of as a bottom-up way to nurture creative thinking. To make this happen, we have hired a new director of technology and innovation, who sits on our Leadership Team. In our first year, we will be launching a Research and Development Team to provide support for the incubation of ideas and prototypes.

Diffusing innovation hits at a core founding vision for Cary Academy: to be a lighthouse school that collaborates within our wider communities. This part of our superstructure can be thought of as a hub to foster engagement. We currently do not have a single individual in charge of this area, but operationally engagement falls into the lap of our director of diversity and inclusion, our service learning director, and our entire advancement team. In our first year, we are conducting a communications audit and experimenting with the ways that proximity might foster new collaborations (by physically moving people next to each other).

Our future is bright, and we believe this new superstructure will give us a way to take our inspirational goals and make them our new reality.

Charting our Future

Dear Friends of Cary Academy,

In a relatively short period of time, Cary Academy has established itself as a premier independent school in the Southeast, serving the diverse and future‐forward population of the burgeoning Research Triangle area. The school is excelling on nearly all benchmarks used to assess independent school strength: strong admissions demand and low attrition rates, prudent fiscal management and solid cash reserves, creative and inspiring teaching and high student and parent satisfaction levels, and a remarkable track record of student success at a broad pool of outstanding colleges and universities.

Operating from this position of strength, the time is right for Cary Academy to take the next step and become one of the leading schools in the world.

With the launch of the school’s new strategic plan, we seek to re‐capture that entrepreneurial, can‐do spirit of our founding – unlocking the next wave of big thinking and creative energy within our community. We aspire to create learning opportunities that are flexible, personalized, and relevant – cultivating self‐directed and bold life‐long learners who make meaningful contributions to the world.

To do this, we will reimagine and redesign our curriculum to help students engage with interdisciplinary concepts and new ideas in both innovative and practical ways. Further, we see exciting opportunities to refine our facilities, providing more mixed‐use, flexible spaces that are oriented towards the technology‐rich ways students and teachers interact with content and with each other. Finally, we aspire to be a leader in the development of outstanding teachers, building programs and connections that have a positive impact in our world.

The Challenge

The world of education is in the middle of an epic transformation. Technology is giving rise to new ways of accessing knowledge, creating meaning, and sharing ideas. Brain science is giving us a deeper understanding of how to consider learning in a singular local context but within a wider, more complex and interdependent world.

As visiting Harvard professor Pasi Sahlberg notes, today’s students need to be “innovation ready.” Students must be able to direct their own learning. Creativity has replaced compliance as an essential outcome of our educational system.

Cary Academy is uniquely positioned to support the development of students for this dynamic future. We believe we can and we must fulfill this vision.

Learn More

You can learn more about our strategic plan from our newly launched website at http://blogs.caryacademy.org/ca2020. On that site you can see the full vision for the next five years, including action items that were drafted as part of the original planning process.

A web site is the most appropriate place to publish our plan, as this is very much a “living document.” While our goals and strategies will remain constant, we expect our action items could adjust to reflect changes in circumstances or new realities. As such, please do feel free to check back on the website periodically to see what we’re up to.

An Invitation

We also invite all Cary Academy parents, grandparents, and alumni to join our employees and students on November 6, 2015 for a day-long Celebration of Creativity and Innovation.

This celebration will take place as part of our traditional “Grandparents and Special Friends Day.” As usual, we will have an exciting program for grandparents in the morning, but we have extended the day to include a mid-day “speakers showcase” and an afternoon of hands-on, creative projects being designed by our visual and performing arts department and technology and robotics faculty.

Look for more information on our website and through email, including a link to a downloadable application for your phone that can serve as your personal guide to all the exciting plans for the day.

Own Your Learning

As I eased myself into the teak rocking chair, I heard a creak. I think it was the chair, but it could have easily been by knees, or my back, or my neck. I lifted the glass lemonade to my lips as I rocked gently back and forth. I was sitting outside the Cary Academy library, looking down the Quad. Beautiful. The smell of newly trimmed grass and the peacefulness of the scene made me happy. A butterfly floated past, the nearest thing to an interruption of the bliss.

It was the evening before school started. And it was calm, and peaceful, and quiet.

By the next morning it could have been another lifetime. The first day of school brought kids, and booming voices, and kids, and muddy shoes, and more kids. Each one tracking dirt into the buildings … and walking … All. Over. Our. Lawn.

Let me start over.

I haven’t been myself over the past few weeks. I’m feeling a bit grumpy as we start the 2015-2016 school year. Some recent headlines have me acutely feeling the passage of time.

You may have heard the news, too. LOL is dead.

After analyzing posts for a seven-day period, Facebook said that the most common form of online laughter during my youth, LOL (Laugh Out Loud), was dead. It has been replaced by haha or hehe (50% + of users) or an emoji (35%). Fewer than 2% of us still use LOL.

I was in high school in the mid-1980s when LOL first came into existence, part of the first online chat rooms. When texting began, pre-smartphone era, I remember the fun that was had when parents, wanting to be hip but demonstrating their cluelessness, tried to use LOL as a stand in for Lots Of Love. This lead to wonderful texts like: “Dear son, you are kind, and good, and talented. LOL. Mom.”

After almost 20 years working its way from chatrooms to text messages, LOL finally hit the big time in 2011 when it made it into the Oxford English Dictionary. Four years later, gone.

That’s got me feeling my age. And I’m not the only one.

Earlier this summer, I came up to the quad to celebrate with the class of 2005 at their 10-year reunion. They wanted to know what had changed at CA. I talked about how classroom and collaboration work has evolved with the use of laptops, the cloud, Haiku, Veracross, and OneNote. Whoa, whoa, they said. Laptops? Seems like a whole lot has changed since they worked on desktops tethered to tables by lots and lots of wires.

When I shared these observations with our upper school students during convocation, I suspect that many of them put them down to the rantings of a typical out-of-touch old person, somebody who still doesn’t get Snapchat. Like really doesn’t get it.

I guess that’s the point, I told them. My mom didn’t get LOL. She just got her first smartphone this summer. Now LOL is gone, a word lost before its time. Will our current students look back in 10 years and laugh at the way they used to communicate by sending pictures, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pictures. All. Day. Long.

Like I said, I don’t get Snapchat.

Change is really the point, though.

According to the most recent Shift Happens video originally created by Karl Fisch and updated by Scott McLeod (and seen more than 10 million times online), the Department of Labor says that an average adolescent today will have 38 jobs in his or her lifetime. For those in elementary school, 65% could have jobs that don’t even exist yet.

How do schools that were conceived to prepare students for an industrial age cope?

Well, we hope that we prepare students to think.

During the convocation, Upper School Principal Heather Clarkson shared some very important perspectives about how we go about this task. Stanford professor Carol Dweck argues the crucial starting point is believing that we can constantly learn and grow.

During a powerful moment of her talk, Ms. Clarkson asked students to close their eyes and reflect on a personal goal for the year. She asked them, eyes still closed, to raise their hands if their goal was about good grades or doing well on a test. She then asked for hands up if a main goal was about a personal challenge to learn or do something new.

I don’t have to tell you what it looked like in the auditorium during that exchange.

Ms. Clarkson then challenged students to consider that the purpose of school is more than just passing somebody else’s test of their worth. We cannot avoid assessments, but we should not be driven or defined by them. We must embrace our capacity to learn and grow throughout life. As Ms. Clarkson aptly tells students: “Own your learning.”

Several others have been challenging us to see things differently for quite a while. Educator Grant Wiggins, writing in Education Leadership more than 20 years ago, said “the aim of curriculum is to ‘awaken’ not ‘stock’ or ‘train’ the mind.” Just this past week, the New York Times op-ed section ran a provocative piece on the importance of teaching ignorance.

The recently approved Cary Academy Strategic Plan contains language that challenges us to think about the ways in which education is changing. It challenges us to think about how we use space, how we organize curriculum, and how we help prepare students for an uncertain future.

If Google, a company seemingly on top of the world, feels a need to change — announcing recently the creation of a new organizational structure and parent company called Alphabet — I suspect that change is coming for us all.

Hey, maybe Alphabet can help bring back my beloved LOL.

Standing on Shoulders

We have a plan!

At their final meeting of this school year, our Board of Directors approved a Strategic Plan for Cary Academy.

Putting it together

This plan represents the collective work of our entire community, and more specifically the efforts of 24 members of a core strategic planning committee and another 36 individuals who served on four action teams. These groups included board members, employees, students, parents, and alumni.

Our planning teams relied heavily on data collected from two big community surveys last year as well as focus groups that helped provide a deeper dive into the state of our school. In addition to school-centered data, the team had a broad reading list that included reports from the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS), Independent School Management (ISM), the Organization of Economic Development and Cooperation (OECD), the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and the Harvard Business School. They tapped the scholarly work of Clayton Christensen, Tony Wagner, John Kotter, Michael Fullen, John Hattie, as well as local experts from UNC-Chapel Hill and NC State’s Friday Institute for Educational Innovation.

The writing of the plan took place beginning at a two-day retreat in October and ending with a two-day retreat in March. In between, action teams fanned out to research and write draft strategies and action items.

Five-Year Planning Cycle

The school has been working on continual improvement through strategic planning for the last 10 years, with plans beginning in 2005 and again in 2010. These plans did a great deal to help create the school that we have today. A quick look at the key goals from each of those plans can help us see how the school has evolved.

Our goals in 2005

Create an environment that attracts, develops, and retains outstanding educators committed to the mission of Cary Academy.
Nurture and grow a constituency that is emotionally connected to the school.
Support students and employees in establishing and maintaining a balanced life.
Better communicate Cary Academy’s admission philosophy, profile of the ideal Cary Academy student, and profile of the ideal Cary Academy class.

Our goals in 2010

To prepare students for their futures, Cary Academy will be a leader in teaching and learning enhanced by the creative and effective use of emerging technologies.
Strengthen the development and retention of outstanding employees who will uphold and advance the mission and values of the school.
Build the framework necessary to ensure the long-term financial sustainability of the school.
Strengthen student development programs to include character education, leadership, ethics, global citizenship and commitment to respect, integrity, and compassion.
Strengthen multi-culturalism in an increasingly diverse school community through education, experiences, and meaningful relationships.

Our vision, goals, and strategies for the next five years

When moving into a new planning cycle, we do not abandon the old goals but instead pull those accomplishments and dreams into a new vision:

Cary Academy will create learning opportunities that are flexible, personalized, and relevant. We will cultivate self-directed and bold life-long learners who make meaningful contributions to the world.

Our goals and corresponding strategies:

Create institutional flexibility to facilitate innovative and dynamic learning experiences by

Creating institutional mechanisms to strengthen and sustain a robust culture of innovation
Creating collaborative time for students and faculty to engage in nontraditional, bold learning opportunities within and across divisions
Reviewing and revising our academic programming to reflect our commitment to student-centered learning

Foster the intellectual and cultural elasticity needed to adapt and thrive in the world by

Enabling community members to identify and delve deeply into areas of passion
Ensuring community members have opportunities to expand cultural awareness and develop cultural competence

Strengthen existing relationships and build new connections to embrace multiple perspectives and opportunities by

Improving access and exposure to Cary Academy news, events, and opportunities for participation in community life
Establishing an accessible network of Cary Academy community members to strengthen relationships and share expertise
Seeking out opportunities with other schools, organizations, and individuals to gather and share knowledge, inspiration, and innovations

Build the professional and learning environments necessary to realize our strategic vision by

Identifying and implementing enhancements to the school’s culture and operations
Identifying and implementing improvements to the campus
Designing and implementing a funding program

Implementation

The implementation of our plan also will require a broad community effort. The plan is designed to be a “living document” — meaning we have clear goals and strategies in place, but the action items will be determined each year as the plan and our needs evolve.

This spring and summer, our Leadership Team will be working to develop the first set of action items that will begin in the fall. These items likely will include:

Creating operational language and structures to promote deeper innovation at Cary Academy, which could include expanding the use of design thinking beyond our current implementation in upper school visual arts program;
Strengthening community by showcasing the breadth of creativity and innovation currently in practice at Cary Academy;
Implementing a formalized, cross-divisional curriculum review cycle;
Reviewing our communication structures within the school and recommending improvements;
Tweaking our academic schedule to enhance collaboration opportunities between and within divisions;
Moving forward with the development of a campus improvement plan to create more student-centered and flexible learning spaces.

The development of this new strategic plan also involved updating the description of our mission statement and the creation of core beliefs about learning, and I look forward to sharing more about these in a future post.

You can follow the full planning process on our web site.

Innovation by Design

Recently I asked all our employees to describe a time in which they felt most alive and engaged in the life of the school. Many reflected on the school’s start up days, when they were collaborating to execute on the founding vision and build something new and exciting.

The product of that labor of love is the Cary Academy we know today, and by nearly every metric we have available, Cary Academy has reached the top tier of independent schools in less than 20 years.

With the upcoming launch of the Cary Academy 2020 Strategic Plan, we will no longer need to reflect backwards to capture that entrepreneurial, can-do spirit of our founding. We soon expect to unlock the next wave of big thinking and creative energy within our community.

An understanding of the importance of innovation and collaboration is much more widely shared than in 1996, when Cary Academy was founded as “a learning community committed to discovery, innovation, collaboration, and excellence.” In the short time since our founding, the internet and mobile technology have transformed industries and upended the ways we communicate and learn. Scholars like Harvard’s Clayton Christensen and John Kotter have studied these disruptions and worked to help organizations understand how to survive and thrive in a fast moving world.

In the language of our strategic plan, we have chosen to highlight the phrase “institutional flexibility” to signal our purposeful desire to design systems that can unlock innovation. The first goal of our draft plan reads: “We will create institutional flexibility to facilitate dynamic and innovative learning experiences.”

John Kotter has called such a setup a “dual operating system” — where smaller-scale improvements can be encouraged from everywhere within an organization and institutional might can be harnessed to do big things with the most relevant and proven concepts. Ultimately, the system itself can be transformed rather than be rendered obsolete.

At Cary Academy, we may take this one step further and ultimately organize around three important aspects of innovation:

Sustaining,
Disrupting,
Diffusing.

Sustaining innovation at Cary Academy means focusing on the core of what we are all about: excellent teaching and learning. Sustaining innovation means having a portrait of an ideal teacher and student, an articulated view of learning, processes for holistic curriculum review, a strong assessment philosophy, and robust methods of for professional evaluation and development.

Disruptive innovation at Cary Academy means having a system to allow for smaller-scale research and development and the willpower to allow new ideas room to grow. To foster meaningful disruptive innovation, we need some common language around process, access to additional resources and talent, and a way to feed back promising ideas into the core of the institution.

Finally, diffusing innovation hits at a core founding vision for Cary Academy: to be a lighthouse school that collaborates with our wider communities. To foster this we need renewed platforms for connecting with constituents and peers locally, nationally, and globally. We need communication systems that share what we are working on and methods to bring people together for meaningful conversations, through short-term methods like meetings and conferences and long-term relationships such as partnerships and exchanges.

In this structure, I hope that you can feel a bit of regular and a bit of radical. Our strategic plan is both a process for continual improvement and path to an even brighter future — but to be effective there needs to be a strong connection between the two. While we might not quite be able to see the future, it is important that we can imagine taking a road that leads us there.

I look forward to sharing more with the community after our Board of Directors endorses the plan at their next meeting.

Creating Innovators

Cary Academy hosted one of the country’s leading voices in educational innovation, Dr. Tony Wagner, on December 15, 2014, for a talk on his most recent book, Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World.

In his presentation and subsequent question and answer session, Dr. Wagner, who is an Expert in Residence at Harvard University’s new Innovation Lab, highlighted the three big elements necessary for schools and parents to create an environment ripe for innovation:

Play
Passion
Purpose

Innovation, Dr. Wagner said, rarely happens from a single lightening bolt of inspiration. Collaboration between individuals and disciplines should be at the core of the work happening in schools — for both teachers and students.

An innovative environment promotes risk taking and the discovery of new connections between ideas. Schools should continue to look for ways to take advantage of students’ intrinsic motivation by giving them some flexibility in their learning and creating a failure-friendly atmosphere. Learning is an iterative process that is sparked when students understand their own abilities and can build upon skills in future work. Wagner’s thinking on the importance of iteration dovetails very nicely with the work of John Hattie on educational achievement that I wrote about earlier this year. Hattie says that one of the biggest factors impacting achievement is when students understand their own learning and give that feedback to their teachers, who can then adjust the next steps in the course.

You can hear a nice summary of Dr. Wagner’s presentation from a talk he gave at Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC, about a month before coming to visit us at Cary Academy.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJbTFU99TAI[/youtube]

State of the School and Strategic Planning — AN INVITE

Dr. Wagner’s talk fits in nicely with many of the themes being discussed in our strategic planning process.

On January 21st at 7 PM in the Dining Hall, I invite all parents to come and hear the annual State of the School address and to participate in the mid-process feedback session regarding our strategic plan.

The State of the School is part of the PTAA Annual Meeting. It is an address by the Head of School containing all sorts of interesting information about Cary Academy. In my talk this year, I’ll share some highlights from the past 18 months and benchmarking data relative to admissions, financials, and student outcomes. In addition, I will talk about the school’s financial picture moving forward, including the tuition for the 2015-2016 school year. There will be a chance after the presentation to ask questions.

Following the State of School presentation, we will give an update on our strategic planning process. In October, I shared the four main goal areas for the plan:

Creating institutional flexibility to facilitate dynamic and innovative learning experiences.
Fostering the intellectual and cultural elasticity needed to thrive in an interdependent world.
Strengthening existing relationships and forging new connections to embrace fresh perspectives and opportunities.
Building the professional and learning environments necessary to realize our dreams.

On January 21st, we will share some of the strategies being developed to address these goals and give participants a chance to provide feedback and ideas that could be incorporated into the action items. The final plan will be put forward to the Board in April.

I hope to see many of you there.

The CA Blend

A few weeks ago, a bold group of Cary Academy students stood in front of a group of 80 public and private educators from across North Carolina and said: We have a voice.

We are capable of thinking deeply about our own education, they said, and should be a part of the local and national conversations about academic achievement and educational reform.

Rather than just complaining about the issue, our students exercised that voice by hosting their own conference on the subject, attended by teachers, administrators, policy makers, and scholars.

The Cary Academy Blended Project

A strong theme throughout the conference had to do with taking advantage of pedagogical strategies that enhanced student learning. One group of students who had a lot to say on the subject were those taking some of our new blended classes this year. A dedicated team of upper school teachers has spent the last six months developing and launching eight new courses that “blend” online and face-to-face teaching strategies. The key components of the Cary Academy blend are that the courses must involve some student choice in time, pace, or place of instruction.

During their panel presentation, our students spoke very enthusiastically about what they called the “time shifting” that is going on in their blended courses. They report a great deal of satisfaction in having some control over when and where they do parts of their coursework. You can see this flexibility exercised in the library, the hallways, outside, or at home.

This may sound insignificant at first, but in reality it is a very big deal.

Don’t believe me? Take a few moments to read the sobering account of the experiences of a teaching coach who shadowed students in her school for two days. Her major takeaways:

“Students sit all day, and sitting is exhausting.”

“High School students are sitting passively and listening during approximately 90% of their classes.”

“You feel a little bit like a nuisance all day long.”

Now, at Cary Academy we like to think that our students are not quite as passive as the norm. Walk into any random class at CA, and you’re likely to see students working individually and in small groups. The teacher is likely moving around and supporting students as they need it. Much thought is given to group and individual learning opportunities. However, within this context, students still have limited choice. By the very nature of our current system, there is an element of control in a traditional classroom that can contribute to students “feeling like a nuisance.”

When we began development of our blended classes, we started with the assumption that the rigor and quality of work would be at the same or higher level than our standard courses. But with students having more control over place, place, and time we expected they might be more engaged in their learning and able to perform at a higher level. Early anecdotal evidence across all of our courses is positive.

This year I am co-teaching a blended Global Leadership class with Upper School Principal Heather Clarkson. We meet our students once a week in a traditional class setting. We also use the flexible time to meet with each of our students individually once a week, to check-in on their personal goals and development as leaders. Each student has chosen an outside “leadership coach” and they meet with them several times over the course of the semester. Coaches are business leaders, academic leaders, religious leaders, and entrepreneurs. By leveraging the flex time, we are able to break down the classroom walls and get our students connected with others in the real world. In addition, our leadership students are taking the online portion of the class with peers at schools in Brazil and India. This week they began an online simulated climb up Mt. Everest to practice some of the teambuilding and communication skills we’ve been working on in class.

We are still early in our blended pilot project. While we are encouraged by the positive feedback from students, our Blended Learning Team is still refining what we do. We are supported in this effort by experts at NC State’s Friday Institute of Educational Innovation. They are helping us develop blended course standards and evaluate our classes against the Cary Academy mission. Importantly, and in line with what students said at their recent conference, student feedback is critical to the evaluation of this new model for instruction.

We are very proud of risk that our student took to host their own conference this October and exercise their voice in an important social issue. In December, Cary Academy will play host to another conference on blended learning, and students will once again be an equal partner in those conversions.