What School Reforms Can Help Prevent Suicide?

Hanna approvingly forwarded me this email from Nicholas Lera, a teacher in the Menlo Park City School District, which is adjacent to Palo Alto:

In the video attached to Hanna Rosin’s recent article on suicides in the Palo Alto area, she mentioned a lack of a counter-culture. I think a small group of teachers at my school, Hillview Middle, is truly making a shift away from the traditional model of teaching and toward a paradigm that focuses on learning, curiosity, and collaboration. We are prototyping classroom management systems, assessment practices, project design practices, curriculum mapping processes, and all kinds of other teacher-speak things. Some of the particular practices include:

• abolishing “D”s and “F”s and replacing scores below 70% with “Not Yet.” Some of us are pushing to replace the entire scale with mastery language.
• gamification of language studies through a “Belt system” (Here’s an example:

  

• optional community circles on Fridays
• flexible deadlines for all assignments
• grades only received on summative assessment; homework is not graded, but tracked.
• genius hour/20% time

The biggest thing is this: We’re always thinking about innovation; we’re always prototyping; and at the heart of it, we’re all deeply invested in making the change we think is needed.

Welp, I feel like I barfed out semi-topical information ... and, I’m hoping Hanna is invested enough to answer a couple of questions for me. How do we go about growing a counter-culture within such a staid system? What role can students play in shifting what “school” means?

• Math in the Garden: “For schools that can afford it, a backyard garden provides community benefits and a new take on learning.”
• What Happens When Students Create Their Own Curriculum?: “Dozens of schools around the U.S. are opting to ditch the traditional school structure altogether to motivate teens in new ways—and it seems to be working.”
• Using a Murder Mystery to Teach Grammar: “Bored with the standard grammar exercises, a teacher in Portugal got creative, creating crimes for students to solve.”
• How a School Project Made City Planners Out of Teens: “A Denver-based teacher tapped an increasingly popular method to get his high-schoolers invested in their AP Geography classwork.”