Not providing access
to A-G courses is a huge inequity at Monarch.
Not doing so, makes it more difficult (not impossible, but considerably
more challenging) for our graduates to a CSU/UC school directly after graduating
from Monarch. Currently, our students
must take college courses at the local community colleges (under a
dual-enrollment program). At the
colleges, students take foreign language and lab science coursework. Although
none of our core courses are A-G certified, students who take the language and
science classes at the community college, become A-G eligible. Of course, they
have to meet the minimum GPA requirements
As I have shared
with my colleagues, providing A-G courses in the traditional manner is near
impossible at Monarch. This is because we enroll about 40 high school
students. Among this group, students
will be working toward different goals: credit recovery, GED prep, college
prep. Having a small group of students
working on diverse goals makes for quite a challenge schedule-wise.
The plan at our new
campus is to expand to about 120 high school students. With a larger group of students, providing an
expanded curriculum (including A-G courses) will be more do-able. In the meantime, we can begin to work on
solutions to this problem using online
courses. We tried this in the
past but it has been a while. Maybe it's
time to try it again?
The phrase that
resonates with me from Wednesday night's presentation is "providing more
legos." When the young mention
shared this metaphor to explain the idea of access to resources, it really made
a lot of sense. To use the same
comparison, my student oftentimes are not born with as many legos as other
students. Other times their legos are
taken from them because of big change in their family's circumstances. A critical job that we have, as educators at
Monarch, is to provide/replace those legos for our students. By doing so, we can begin to level the
playing field.
I am not sure why you abandoned online learning as a delivery method, but I can guess that it just wasn't effective. For the most part, we haven't done online delivery effectively. Much of it reminded me of the old correspondence courses we took by mail. The computer was just faster. Now, I believe the delivery models are getting better. We do need to become more adept in supplementing, even designing collections of online resources that are more interesting and effective. Online learning can't be solely skills based with rote delivery. I think one disruption in the publishing field will be some upstart company that designs platforms that allow just that.....teachers on Twitter or a Wiki who collectively submit the "best" resources on a particular concept. The platform allows me, as the teacher, to efficiently and effectively put together a "unit" of experiences that help learners to explore and build understanding of the concept and meet standards. If this were an anytime/anywhere type of platform (aka internet cloud not tied to software loaded on school computers) your students could continue their learning even when they move from your school. That might be the only consistent thing in their lives.....your teachers and an interesting relevant online curriculum....
ReplyDeleteHave you ever discussed with the community colleges the possibility of teaching their courses at Monarch? At least this way the course would still be housed at your school? Maybe even a hybrid course that is partially online, partially in person?
ReplyDelete