Kerry Tuttlebee (Principal) and Chris Audette (Teacher/Facilitator) are opening 360 High School — a new, mastery-based high school in Providence, RI — this fall, with generous funding from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. We spoke with them about their experience designing the school, and what they’re looking forward to in this first year.
Springpoint: What made you want to start a new school?
Kerry: Why wouldn’t you want to start a new school? I’ve met many educators who say their dream is to start a school. For me, after consulting, working in the district, and working in a charter setting, I wanted to have some freedom and autonomy within a district. I wanted to do something different, and to prove that we could get very different results for our students, especially in a city like Providence. So, this opportunity was really tailor-made for me, not only because it’s about creating a school that’s awesome for students who attend, but because it’s about creating a school that has the potential to influence wider change in the community.
Springpoint: What was your background prior to assuming this role? What made you excited about high school?
Kerry: I laugh at this all the time—I kind of get a kick out of the fact that I’m a high school principal now because I started almost 20 years ago teaching early childhood education—3 and 4 year-olds. Most of my school career has been at the elementary level.
Then I did some consulting around social and emotional learning for several years. I worked for TNTP, and I launched the Rhode Island Teaching Fellows program, which is the first alternative certification program for teachers in secondary schools.
I feel like as a school leader, you are in the position to effect the greatest change. I entered a turnaround leadership program and was placed in residency at Hope High School. After my time at Hope, I began to consider the possibility of becoming a high school principal. Several students encouraged me to consider a future as a high school principal. These experiences guided me towards my current journey.
As I continued working at Hope, I began to see the high-school principalship as more of a possibility. It was powerful to work directly with youth, and to see how articulate they were about their education. They clearly saw the issues and challenges in our current system, and the potential, and I felt like I could be someone to help channel that desire to make systemic improvements.
When I began this process, I was very self-deprecating about my elementary background. In response, others were saying, “we need a little elementary at the high school.” The elementary approach is really about seeing youth as whole people—it’s a very youth-development centered approach—and I think it’s useful to bring some of that to high school.
Springpoint: How did you approach the design process? What were your goals when you were setting out?
Kerry: My number one goal was to get the community involved in a meaningful way. We want our school to embody the Carnegie design principle about a school being porous and connected to its community, and we wanted to start that early. This meant students, of course, but also other community members and those who may not be traditionally involved in the school design process. I wanted to be strategic about it, because I knew that stakeholder engagement can be extremely time-intensive. I wanted to think about who we want in the process in different ways. I also thought a lot about our students, and about how it can be difficult to have youth participate meaningfully at a table of adults. We wanted to make sure all stakeholders, including students, were really treated as equals.
I really thought about what kinds of structures I could create that would allow us to get meaningful feedback from youth, and how we could really make people feel like they’re contributing and owning the work with me. To that end, I created three groups to help guide the process in different ways.
One was our design team, and I made sure that we had equitable membership from students, teachers and community members. I tried to have a range within the community members of young adults as well, and also folks who’ve had experience in nontraditional academic settings. Originally, I thought about having older youth on the design team, and having younger adolescents involved in a steering committee of students, which would be all youth. However, as I started interviews for both groups, I met some young men—two, in particular, 9th and 10th graders—who were just incredible, and I knew I had to have them on my design team. So I learned not to limit it by age.
The second group was a steering committee that included students from 8th to 12th grade. They really functioned as an sounding board to review the design team’s work. We brought different iterations of our design to them for feedback. Chris and our team would present to them regularly, they would critique our work, and then we would go back to the drawing board and get additional feedback from them. It was enormously helpful.
Lastly, I had a third group of stakeholders on an advisory group who met monthly. It included a lot of folks from community organizations, higher education and other students. We would bring specific, smaller pieces of our work to them to get feedback and advice along the way. Having those built-in feedback mechanisms was really important to us, because it meant we had folks who were ready and waiting to help us get to the next stage of the process.
Springpoint: How did you motivate students to participate meaningfully in the design process?
Chris: Students definitely wanted to have their voices heard in fixing things about how we do high school. The opportunity was presented in such a way that students would have opportunities to visit other schools and do research in the community. I know a lot of students we worked with were grateful for those opportunities. It was also valuable for them to go through the design process. We were all sitting at the table together as equal partners. It was a very unique experience, and we all grew from it.
Kerry: We also intentionally recruited students who were interested in doing this work. It was a very rigorous selection process. I talked to youth and adults who weren’t necessarily on the same page with what we were trying to do. For example, we’d say “school design” and some students would think, “oh, architecture—I’m interested in architecture so I want to do this.” So, our selection process was designed as a two-way approach (I wanted them to understand what they were signing up for, and that it would be intense) and we were able to find people who could collaborate really wisely.
Participating students received a small stipend (probably pennies for how much time they spent). I am confident that some of the relationships and experiences they’ve had will help them with college applications and future work as well.
Springpoint: What kind of principal do you think you will need to be to succeed in this new, innovative environment?
Kerry: I think it’s a lot like the leadership we fostered in the design process, which is about creating the right conditions for others to be empowered and active leaders. My goal is not to generate new ideas that will change the future of education—sometimes I come up with a good idea, but my real goal is to create an environment where staff feel safe, empowered, and supported to come up with innovative ideas themselves. My job is to steer them clear of obstacles, get them what they need, and create a team-oriented culture. It’s really centered on the Carnegie principle of developing and deploying collective strengths. I think that’s what will really help our school to be nimble and flexible during these first years and beyond.
Springpoint: Tell us three exciting, innovative things about your school model.
Chris: It begins with our name. We’re 360 High School, and we believe in 360 degrees of support and opportunity. We’re designing individualized support systems to move students forward from where they are. Many schools are centered on people like me—the teachers and the adults. So we’re envisioning a school that’s completely student-centered.
Kerry: Another thing that’s exciting about us is our advisory model. We call it a “hub” and it’s really the heart of the school. It will meet twice a day—to set up the day and to close it. We’re really trying to support close relationships between students and adults, and to make sure each student has a key point person. We think having advisory each day, rather than once a week, will make a big difference.
One other fun thing is our daily power lunch. Before the sit-down part of lunch every day, we will have a physical activity. There will be some fun options, and eventually students can help lead these too. For example, we might have yoga in the classroom for fifteen minutes before lunch. Or walking the track, walking the stairs, playing a group game. Just some sort of physical activity to get students and staff up and moving. Occasionally, the power lunch will continue with a special guest, or different types of learning experiences as well. We’re trying to make the most of that lunch block.
Springpoint: How exactly will 360 concept of support manifest in your school? How will you support students in ways they wouldn’t experience in a traditional high school model?
Kerry: Every student will have a personalized education plan, and we will build a goal-oriented culture to ground our supports and schedules for each student. Students’ learning plans will be centered on goals students create for themselves, both academic and social/emotional. Some schools do this and others don’t, especially at the high school level. We will support students as they create, track, revise, and reflect upon their lifelong, yearly, monthly, weekly, and daily, goals.
Chris: We also believe in asynchronous learning. Students will be learning at their own pace, and we’ll be using 1:1 Chromebooks as a tool to support students’ daily progress towards mastery. We’re also using a Learning Management System, Empower, which enables us to create playlists, and track student proficiency levels. It’s one of the ways we will be able to personalize learning.
Kerry: We will also implement student-led conferences. These conferences will be a way for students to share their evidence of mastery and progress toward goals with their families and caregivers. It will be an opportunity for them to really start to practice being in charge of their own learning.
Springpoint: Chris, could you talk a little bit about your experience as a teacher in the design process? What are you looking forward to in the year? What made you excited to be part of a founding team?
Chris: It’s a tremendous opportunity. It’s great to know that we’ll begin with 100 kids and grow every year. It’s really a dream, and I’m ecstatic to see this begin. I’m also taking on multiple roles here. My official job title is “facilitator,” so I am definitely envisioning a student-centered environment. I’m also beginning a leadership program, with Kerry as my mentor, as well as designing a humanities course. We’re trying to envision what the student experience will look like in this course. I will be learning just as much, I hope, as the students will be learning this year.
Springpoint: What does the transition from “teacher” to “facilitator” mean to you?
Kerry: For me as an elementary teacher, it’s not a huge shift. I often see myself, facilitating small groups at different levels. So I’ve always felt like a facilitator in many ways. And having whole-class experiences is an important part of that role as well.
Chris: I am coming from more of a traditional school, where the common modality is more teacher-centered. So it will be a bit more of a shift for me, and I think that’s more common for staff coming from the secondary level.
Springpoint: Chris, given that you will be in a facilitator role, how are you planning to design a mastery-based, blended humanities class?
Chris: I had an opportunity to work in a mastery-based school earlier in my career, in Providence. We designed a similar school, E3 Academy, which was also mastery-based. But obviously, I’ve seen mastery-based learning develop over ten years, so I’m learning a great deal as that’s happening.
A humanities course has enormous potential. The arts, history, and English Language Arts have all sorts of parallels and opportunities for connection. We’re envisioning an authentic team teaching approach between myself and my humanities colleagues. Obviously, making this meaningful for kids will take a lot of planning and collaboration among adults. We’re very excited about our new team’s potential. We really hope to build a model that will grow, and that we can continue to reiterate and develop based on student needs.
Springpoint: How do you think your teaching practice will change in this model?
Chris: This will be my first experience with authentic asynchronous learning. That will be an adjustment for me, and I know I will face a learning curve. I envision myself doing a lot of 1:1 work with students, a lot of small-group work.
Kerry: We are going to try some things out this year and see what the results look like. I think, though, sometimes the push toward blended and personalized learning goes too far in the direction of technology as the savior. I prefer to think of technology as a tool. So, if I were a teacher in a school, I would struggle more with balancing personalization and whole-group experiences—what novels do we want to do with book club, what kinds of shared whole-class experiences or whole class projects do we want to do? We have to figure out how to strategically keep those shared threads going, but still have a lot of time and space for personalization. Because the whole-group, shared experiences are really powerful, as well as the small-group collaboration.
We know so much about the cognitive growth that occurs through social interaction and talking about our learning. So, if everyone’s at a different pace, how do we create meaningful experiences for students to share their learning in a different way?
Springpoint: What advice would you give to those who are beginning their design work now?
Kerry: Don’t do it alone. Get a team, and figure out a team process. It will pay dividends. Our design team officially ended in June, and many of them are still volunteering or becoming staff members of the school. Even those who aren’t—they still care, and they are ambassadors for this work. They are all invested, they want to see this school succeed, and they will be involved in the school for years to come. It’s been thrilling.
I think the other part of that is that you have to be very intentional about student involvement and student participation. If you’re going to have youth at the table, which I highly recommend, don’t take for granted that the adults at the table are ready to treat those youth as equals. Don’t take it for granted that youth are ready to participate in that way, either. You have to strategically create the conditions that will allow that to happen.
Chris: I agree, assembling the core team is essential. I know there were a few times where I was chomping at the bit to move things along more quickly. But in the end, it’s important to make sure everyone’s voice is heard. It’s important to trust the process. If you go with the process, it can be an incredible journey.
We’ve also worked to develop the mindset that we’re building something that will continue to change and grow. It’s not finished yet, and it will never really be finished. That was really a mindset shift for me. Going in with that mindset and building that for people can be extremely powerful.
Springpoint: Congratulations on leading this design process. We’re glad it was useful to you.
Kerry: Yes, thank you. Our collaborative process also mirrors the type of school we are trying to create. So, I think there’s an intentionality there as well. I want to have a democratically governed school. To get there, I wanted a democratically governed designed process. So it made sense in that way, too.