Summit Builds Its Own Facilitators

Education Dive just became the latest site to ooh and ahh over Summit Charter School's in-house facilitator factory.

The focus of the story is a molecular biologist who has decided to try his hand in the classroom-- specifically a classroom in one of Summit Charter's chain of charteriness. Summit, you may recall, is the chain that garnered back from Mark Zuckerberg, that offers its program for free to any school that wants it, and plans to spin that part of the business off into a Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative controlled enterprise soon.

Summit is all about the mass-customized, computer-centered personalized [sic] learning, and you can see the implications in the language the article uses.

As we watch the proto-teacher in action, the article describes "the lesson he is leading in the classroom." (Emphasis mine). Not teaching. Leading.

Bobby's classmates thought "We'd better get a guide over here soon."

The head of the Summit residency program, Pamela Lancke, describes a good candidate as someone who is "open to classrooms looking different than what they might have experienced themselves" a well as being comfortable with students moving at their own pace. The latter qualification seems bizarre-- exactly where might we find a teacher who's uncomfortable with students moving at their own pace? But part of the pitch here is to contrast Summit neo-teachers with Mrs. Strawy McStrawman.

"The role of teacher is very different — more of a facilitator and coach than a lecturer," Lamcke said, adding that if someone is proud of being a “great orator,” he or she probably wouldn't thrive in a Summit school or any other personalized learning environment.

Seriously-- have you ever heard a teacher say, "My big strength is my oratory skills." And the implication that this somehow all radical new is silly. I was in teacher school in the 1970s when we heard incessantly about being the guide on the side instead of the sage on the stage. I'll wager there isn't a teacher anywhere in the country who doesn't know about this. So why hasn't direct instruction died out? Because in many cases, it works. Because students will say, "Can you please explain this to me?" Because if you are not more knowledgeable about the content than your students are, why are we taxpayers paying you?

The Summit answer is "to facilitate and coach while the students work through their computer-delivered lessons." This model is not popular every where. Just last week, Brooklyn students became the latest to protest Summit's program. They join schools like Cheshire Schools in Connecticut in rejecting a program that students describe as staring at a computer all day or being expected to teach yourself.

The article could address this pushback-- instead it just lets Lamcke say that A) it's a mystery but B) it's probably because stodgy old Mrs. McStrawman can't shift her thinking.

But then, Summit's program is bold-- at the top of their webpage they quote a group of Silicon Valley parents who asked "What happened to the American public high school and what can we do to fix it."

The pitch describes the perfect candidate as one who believes all students can be successful, who wants to work in a diverse cohort, who believes in a personalized path for every student, who has a growth mindset, and who is interested in teaching as a profession. If so, why aren't you in an teacher prep program? And why doesn't the list include anything about being a person with content knowledge.

The one-year residency program yields a preliminary single subject teaching credential, which in California is a credential that lets you teach for five years while you complete various bits of coursework. And when you're all done, you're first in line for a job at a Summit Charter School.

There are things--well, thing, anyway-- to like about this model. A teacher internship with four days a week of shadow/team teaching for an entire year, with the fifth day spent meeting with other interns for further development-- that's a good framework (though I wonder about the interns' source of income for the year). But the framework doesn't seem to be filled with much substance, and some of the details the EdDive article reports are just silly.

Molly Posner, an academic program manager with Summit, starts the morning by having residents write down any feelings of frustration they want to express, whether that's in essay or poetry form.
"You could just write down the words to your favorite break-up song," she says. Then, she has them crumple up what they wrote and throw it away — a symbolic act of clearing their minds and focusing on what they still need to complete. For the rest of the morning, they work individually and in groups to address remaining questions about their final projects.

I won't pretend that some traditional teacher prep programs don't waste time on similar silliness. But that doesn't excuse it. And Summit's program seems lacking in actual content knowledge development. And ultimately you've been trained to be a facilitator.

This is one of the innovations of the charter movement; if you can't find teachers willing to work in your stripped down beat up version of a school, just grow your own. It's not an innovation I welcome. Some combination of sage on the stage and guide on the side is still preferable to the tutor in the computer.