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Correction (12 March 2018): The Somerville Times would like to clarify a few errors pointed out by the Powderhouse Studios team. You can read a comment by Alec Resnick responding directly to this article below.
1. Powderhouse Studios is still in negotiation with the STA, and its Innovation Schools proposal has not yet been formally voted on by the Somerville School Committee. This means the article’s original statement that Powderhouse Studios was “set to open next year” is incorrect.
2. In addition to Alec Resnick, Shaunalynn Duffy, and Bakhtiar Mikhak, Molly Josephs is part of the Powderhouse Studios team. The original article failed to include Molly Jospehs.
Furthermore, because the Powderhouse Studios team didn’t feel the original article fully represented the reasons behind and nature of their work, The Somerville Times has asked the Powderhouse Studios team to draft a piece, which will be linked here when published.
A rendering of an evening event at Powderhouse Studios.
By Emily Blackwood
Shaunalynn Duffy spent most of her time in high school trying to decide when to drop out. Her mother, confident in her daughter’s abilities to independently educate herself, even offered up the idea of “unschooling.”
“Something about hearing the bells ring and just feeling really disrespected and unseen by many of the adults in my life,” she said. “Even with the extreme confidence my mother saw in me, I couldn’t feel that confidence in myself.”
Looking back, Duffy said she now understands the critical role self-determination can play in a person’s success, and how having a flexible learning environment can make that possible.
That’s why she and Alec Resnick founded Powderhouse Studios, a new proposed, small, research-intensive school where students will have the opportunity to work on long-term projects.
“Growing up, my experience in school was positive, but the things I cared about the most were happening outside of school,” Resnick said. “And I learned a ton of really awful time management strategies.”
A rendering of Powderhouse Studios in Somerville. — Photos courtesy of Sebastian Mariscal Studio & MarKa
By focusing on long-term, meaningful projects, students will learn how to take an idea and make it a reality. Something Duffy and Resnick believe is crucial for teaching people how to manage their time, resources and workload. Something that doesn’t always happen when every student is learning and doing the same thing.
“You learn things that you really care about,” Resnick said. “And also as soon as you say everyone is doing the same thing, people are behind or ahead and it can really screw with your process of learning.”
The school is set to open in Somerville the fall of next year, with construction currently being done at 1060 Broadway. About 30 to 40 students, ages 13 to 15, will be enrolled every year. The maximum amount Resnick hopes to have is between 120 to 160 students.
With three faculty members on staff so far — Duffy, Resnick and Bakhtiar Mikhak — the team’s goal is to have four staff members for every cohort of students. A project manager, program designer, youth advocate, and domain specialist will stay with the students throughout their time at PHS.
“It’s not just checking off boxes in lesson plans,” Duffy said. “The staff is pushing you because they know you, they know you can do better, and they know that you know you can do better.”
In addition to spending time working on creative projects — that could range from starting an immigrant rights organization to building a robot that could bring a slice of cake to your sister — PHS students will also receive a stipend that could be spent on project supplies or on learning other extracurriculars the school doesn’t provide. They could pull some of their money together to pay for guitar lessons or a gym membership, Renick said.
“It’s a lot of thinking about how do we use our resources,” he said. “The cognitive piece is how to learn something on your own.”
And it’s the starting and finishing projects, Duffy said, that will give students the confidence and knowledge that they can make things happen.
“You don’t want someone to say to you, ‘You can’t do that,'” she said. “It’s about maintaining motivation so they feel like they finish things that are real and meaningful to them.”
For more information on Powderhouse Studios, visit www.powderhouse.org.
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As a public school teacher in Somervile, who works hard every day to engage, challenge, and inspire ALL students in the district (not just a selected few) I am deeply insulted by the insinuations carelessly thrown out and published here. The idea that the craft of teaching that my colleagues and I have dedicated our work to is “checking off boxes” is a concerning operating premise of the work being done at Somerville Public Schools. I believe this article also insinustes that Somerville teachers fail to care about and get to know their students—again this is deeply insulting to my colleagues and I who open are doors and lives to hundreds of students every day well beyond the bells. While as an educator and community member who does care deeply about our kids, I am excited to have an innovation school here as an option for our students, I think those leading it should begin their work in the district with more respect for those that are here doing it now and will continue to teach ALL students.
I teach English to Speakers of Other Languages at Somerville High, a Tier 1 public high school school. For the past 6 years I have been working there I have been amazed not only by the students, but also by the faculty. I’ve taught in a lot of places, in a lot of contexts and I have never had the pleasure of having such devoted and selfless colleagues. The only thing more distressing than the insinuation that Somerville teachers “check off boxes” is the Somerville Times careless printing of such a remark, without context or response from teachers who have been doing the work.
As a graduate of Somerville High School (’85) and a current ELA teacher there, I am disappointed that people who will technically be colleagues are instead creating an “us” versus “them” dynamic. It’s easy to pontificate from the perch of time and space and say what might have helped us grow. But the truth is that a) school as it is today is not the school of our respective youths, even for those of us who stand by the education we participated in, and b) the sum of our life experiences leads us to where we are. So where are we? We are in a place where some individuals have cast aspersions regarding the jobs we do in all the other schools in Somerville. Building bridges might have been wise rather than creating chasms. At the high school alone, we have over fifty after school clubs and activities that range from the Coding Club to Women’s Empowerment to Future Chefs. In fact, if students would like to engage in activities “that could range from starting an immigrant rights organization to building a robot,” our students are already doing that in the Student Immigrant Movement (SIM) and the Robotics Club, respectively. There is also a wide range of academics and we remain one of the few truly comprehensive high schools in the state with a fully integrated career and technical education program within the high school.
I taught in Somerville fogr 38 years. I found the article insulting and self serving. My colleagues and I took time to know our students as best we could despite the fact that we had upwards of one hundred plus students from all backgrounds and abilities, not just a small, elite, hand-picked group. Furthermore, teachers are told what to teach, and often, when. We do not check off boxes, but try to get each child to where he or she needs to be. It would have been nice to offer a stipend to kids who needed one. No one says kids can’t do things, but teachers don’t always have the resources to give so many kids so much kids.
I don’t get all the defensive comments. This article doesn’t say anything about quality or commitment of Somerville schools or teachers.
About a decade ago, I did a study for the Metro North Regional Education Board, to identify “at risk” schools. At the time, an earlier Principal at SHS had established a pattern of flunking the lowest 25% of every 9th grade, in order to engineer a higher “gain score” between 8th and 10th grade MCAS exam. I helped end that, and the next Principal, Tony Ciccariello, created teams of seniors to mentor/tutor those at risk. He cut the dropout rate by 20%. Innovations like Powderhouse have a history.
It’s so sad that these responses to Powderhouse model are so polar. As an interdisciplinary college teacher from the 1960’s, first for a consortium of 13 colleges across the South, and then at Dillard University in New Orleans, and Emerson and UMass, and, finally, as a consultant to hundreds of others, I am really surprised that these responses ignore Somerville’s own history of innovation, readiness to adapt interdisciplinary collaboratives with Tufts, Lesley, Harvard, MIT and Bunker Hill, and long and quite remarkable history of teaching creativity.
One of the most insightful observations I ever heard was when a former SHS administrator described how an AP student in physics walked across a hall and engaged a Voc Ed student in auto shop to help measure the physics of auto brakes. With one of the very few integrated vocational/academic programs in the state, the High School is already an emblem of collaboration. To see that collaboration undermined by such offensive ideology is profoundly disappointing. And it wasn’t by the Powderhouse folk, but by your responses.
As a teacher, I would expect Mr. DiPietro knows that all students have individual and unique skills, and deserve a broad range of education opportunities that fits their skills as well as their aspirations. They do not have identical brains to be filled at the same rate with the same traditional data. When any kid can have the Encyclopedia Britannica on their phone, the job of the school is not to deliver information, but to inspire creative curiosity and build personal competency. That will take place at BOTH the High School and Powderhouse and is NEVER a single program, just like it’s not a single teacher.
And Mr. Halawa should, as a teacher who enjoys his job and linking with individual and unique young people, know that “checking off boxes” refers to plans to pass the tests that, finally, have become less oppressive due to the quality of existing individualized education programs. There are some very good – and often, it would seem ignored – reasons why the desks aren’t all screwed into the floor, and the rules made to work to generate insight rather than restrict perspectives.
The SHS School Improvement Council, in fact, created and authorized a nationally recognized ePortfolio system almost a decade ago, which gave – and still gives – “high stakes testing” perspective and helped the High School leap several levels from it’s past to Level 1. Transcending the boxes involves individualizing assessment, and Somerville’s portfolios, funded by Kellogg and Ford and others a decade ago, did that exceedingly well. “Boxes” reflect test sales by players like Pearson to naive “educators” like Betsy DeVos. Somerville’s been better than that for years, but still ignores its own strength.
And for Lisa Brewster-Cook, the “us” vs. “them” division is your own creation. There is absolutely no reason for you to ignore the nationally funded XQ School to start at Powderhouse, and every reason for you to use it as a means of building your own skills, your own college/school networks, and your students’ curiosity in the most traditional of classrooms. It is a laboratory school, but, in fact, every classroom in any good school is a laboratory learning space, and feedback between Powderhouse and other models should enrich every student and every teacher. Do not presume they won’t talk or work together, just because they’re down the street. While it’s quite true that this article should have mentioned the differences in schedule – with grades 7 through 12 with a 12 month program of 8 hour days at Powderhouse vs. the variations in schedules you describe quite well at the High School – those differences should build on your own foundation and allow all schools to reflect on the kind of projects your – and Powderhouse students – create.
And CherylAnn Welch, I don’t see why or how you see this article insulting or self-serving, other than your own response. The Powderhouse model is based on decades of research, including the experience of many of your peers, and intended to serve student needs rather than enforce traditional formulaic patterns of 19th century calendars, schedules, departments, and other archaic and often intrusive barriers. Standardized tests check off the boxes, and good teachers have – for decades – struggled to transcend the kinds of scheduling and departmental barriers you cite. Again, with easy access to data, there is less reason to feel insulted by interdisciplinary solutions and even less to embrace the structural problems you cite to individualized instruction.
The fact that Powderhouse will have a longer schedule should be seen as an invitation to collaboration rather than a confrontation of tradition. Such traditions as summer-jobs in the agricultural economy no longer make sense in this city. And schedules that start early and end early don’t either. You may choose them, or “innovate” to whatever standards you think work best for your students. But enforcement is ruthless, and the tone and style of these responses simply unprofessional.
As one of the Powderhouse team members interviewed, I wanted to comment on at least two of the things which are wrong about this article (though there are others). I just saw it today—
The first is just factual: Powderhouse Studios is *not* set to open next year, since it still hasn’t been voted on by the Somerville School Committee (since we’re still working with the STA to develop the details of the policies under which Powderhouse staff would be part of the union…given a different calendar, staffing structure, and so on, there are a lot of details to work through).
The second is about tone. I agree with Jamal and Cheryl Ann and Lisa and David’s comments…The article misrepresents a lot about how we think about high school. We don’t feel—and didn’t suggest in the interview—that the experience at Somerville High School is about “checking off boxes”. Maybe there are classrooms out there like that, but in our experience over the past decade, that’s not Somerville, and that’s not why we’re working to start Powderhouse Studios.
In our pilot programming at the Healey last year, in working to set up the Fab Lab at Somerville High School, throughout hundreds of conversations with staff and families over the past few years, it’s abundantly clear how devoted staff in Somerville are. We’re just hoping to join the team—
We’re working to start Powderhouse Studios because we think there’s room for an option for some people who would benefit from a much smaller environment and/or spending a lot more time working on hands-on projects of their own design.
When the Mayor approached us about the idea of starting something under the Innovation Schools legislation five years ago, it had nothing to do with “checking off the boxes”— it had to do with creating a new option for some students in Somerville.
It seems to me that if the article “misrepresents a lot” about how you think about high school it isn’t coming from some bias on the part of the news writer. The bulk of the article – virtually all of it, in fact – consists of direct quotes from or references to statements made by representatives of this Powderhouse dingus of yours, including the now infamous “checking off boxes” comment. If there is any “tone” to this thing it has been set by them. Further, when the news writer gave a certain date for an opening, it must have been based on something tangible. That something was most likely a statement made to her by one of your “team members”. Good luck trying to sell the idea that the writer is incompetent or somehow biased against Somerville public schools. It won’t wash. It looks like the “team members” ought to pull together and get their story straight. Debate this thing all you want, but place the blame on any misrepresentation where it belongs. Own it.
Lets calm down – I doubt the “insensitive” language was directed at SHS, The article was clearly written as a way to differentiate the educational approach from the traditional system.
First, this is a marketing piece, its intended to sell the concept of a new type of publicly funded school to the city both the residents and the School Committee so that it can actually be opened.
Second if they are opened then they will be competing with other schools in the city and they need to “win” the best students and to do they they need to show they have the best product.
We all want to see kids in our community receive the best education possible, perhaps a little competition is a good thing.
Don’t have a dog in the fight here. But I’d like to commend the level of discourse and commentary here. These are all very thoughtful and lucid comments that are very interesting and educational for those of us who don’t have the experience or expertise to weigh in on such matters. Thanks for your contributions here, it’s a valuable service.
I agree that most of the commenters here need to take a step back and not jump to conclusions. They seem extremely defensive, and I cannot understand what they are afraid of.
This is a very short article with some very short quotes that now lack broader context. This makes it very difficult to understand the broader picture and purpose of such innovation schools. Joe Beckmann’s detailed history of educational innovation is very illuminating and providing some necessary context for those who seem to fear creative new educational opportunities when this is simply an outlet of the creativity that has been ongoing at SHS and other schools.
I have spoken to Alec and researched the ideas behind this school considerably, and it is incredibly reasonable. It is a basic fact that a single school, no matter how advanced and versatile SHS has become, may not be able to provide for the needs of all types of students. I know many many friends who would have benefits immensely in their education and future career paths from the opportunity to try a model like PowderHouse.
Not a single person should be criticizing this school BEFORE it even exists yet and not until it has been given a chance to demonstrate its worth.
I have had the opportunity to work with all of the folks at Powder House Studios and I can assure people that they are respectful colleagues in the teaching community. I have spent many hours developing curriculum with them and I truly believe their model represents a new approach that will fit the unique needs and desires of a specific population. The small size and focused curriculum is something that will help some of our students who are falling through the cracks academically and not achieving at the rate they could be, whether that be due to motivation, poor social or study skills, or just a need for a small comfortable environment. When working with the PHS staff, we even had discussions about possible hybrid programs to meet the unique needs of students with complex academic profiles. This seems like a way to continue to improve our graduation rates and increase successful outcomes beyond high school. The program has not been regarded lightly and those that are feeling uncomfortable should check the results from the previous work.