Week One Reading Reflection - Rethinking High School

After reading the chapter Best Practice by Design, the element that most caught my eye was the enthusiasm the author has for creating a new high school. Based on what I have seen so far at the schools I have observed, enthusiasm on an administrator or teachers part has the greatest impact on the students. When teachers are passionate about what they teach, and administrators are passionate about providing the best educational experience, many of the reforms mentioned in the article seem to fall in place naturally. But then, of course, the real world worries of budget-issues, class sizes and quality of teachers steps in, and your left with the majority of the US high schools we see today.

One of the most important elements discussed in the chapter was class size. This really resonates with me, because I attended a private high school that had no more than 15 students/classroom. This was an ideal learning environment because it felt safe, there was plenty of individual attention, classroom discussions flourished with this amount of students, and you cant get away with anything in a class of 15. Walking into classrooms now, I'm confronted with 34 students, in rows, looking up at me, or, more often, staring into space. How can you create a welcoming, safe environment when you have so many students? How can you provide the individual attention that they need, and get to know them? Especially in an English classroom when so much writing is occurring and some of the work is of a personal nature, I believe the class sizes need to be reduced, and that this should be a priority.

The amount of changes that the authors were looking to make in their Best Practices High School is reasonable if starting a new school, but for existing high schools this seems overly-ambitious. It seems that high schools have been chugging along, often ineffectively, changing little since they were originally opened. The world around them has completely changed, yet the schools themselves are still doing things the same way they did 40 years ago. If schools could start incorporating elements of reform, one at a time, I think we would start to move in a positive direction. But every effort needs to be put behind the change at hand, to set it up for success.