By Elina Alayeva

Ask a high schooler about their day-to-day experience, and you’ll probably hear things like:

“It’s boring.”  

“I feel like I’m wasting my time.” 

“I don’t think what we’re learning matters.”  

“The work doesn’t require much brainpower, to be honest.”

They’re right. We can’t chalk it all up to teen malaise. Despite years of deep work by educators and other key stakeholders, most American high schools are failing our students. Not only are students bored and disengaged, they aren’t being prepared to succeed in the world they will confront when they graduate. Many are being left behind entirely.

Springpoint has seen these problems firsthand over the last decade. We’ve worked with schools and districts across the country to redesign the high school experience, deploying evidence-based strategies to help schools prioritize student voice, focus on mastery of essential skills and content, build a coherent culture, and systematize continuous improvement. We’ve visited thousands of classrooms and talked to students, teachers, and leaders. We have all used (and indeed helped normalize and popularize) the sector shorthand and terms that offered so much promise: next gen, student-centered, personalized learning, PBL, SEL.

We’ve seen incredible spaces, flexible schedules, sophisticated competency frameworks, cutting edge technology, and broad partnerships. And we’ve witnessed valuable shifts: Educators have increasingly learned to embrace a growth mindset, focus on building caring and trusting relationships with their students, and infuse learning with more relevant and culturally responsive themes.

Nonetheless, we’re struck by how little has changed about the student learning experience.

Despite the volume of reform-minded activities that schools have embarked upon, what students are offered in the classroom seems frozen, amber-like, in an era long past. In many classrooms, students continue to be treated as passive recipients of information, regurgitating facts and plodding through uninspired assignments and weak projects rather than confronting real-world problems and taking on the cognitively demanding work of evaluation, analysis, synthesis and application.

For a group of folks who know high school, who’ve led schools and school systems, and spent decades working to improve them, this has been a tough pill to swallow. Yet, we now have significant clarity around what it takes to make high school meaningful: a laser focus on what’s being asked of students and what they’re spending time on. (Details in our latest paper.)

This includes:

• Opportunities to delve deeply into topics that really concern or excite them;
• instruction that challenges students to grapple with cognitively complex ideas in a sustained way;
• curricula that reflect a wide range of student identities;
• projects that connect students to the larger world;
• and the chance to build skills that they will actually use outside of the classroom.

This is what high school needs to be. Today’s students are living amid a global pandemic, a climate crisis, and a nation struggling to confront its history of injustice; they realize that the world needs them to be ready to engage productively with these challenges.

A more meaningful high school experience is within reach.

We’ve seen schools reengage students and reignite their love of learning. We have talked to kids who find joy, purpose, and pride in what they’ve accomplished. And we know what it takes: ‘transformative learning experiences’ —the kind that offer real and consistent rigor (not just dialing up the difficulty on assignments) and are deeply grounded in purpose, connecting young people to their power to contribute, make an impact, and lead choice-filled lives. (Learn more about how we define rigor and purpose.)

 That all sounds great. But what might a transformative classroom actually look like?

• Behind one door, students collaborate in small groups, positing ideas, asking questions, searching for evidence, building off of and challenging one another’s thinking as they try and answer a provocative and open-ended question that lacks an obvious solution.  The teacher circulates, listens carefully and intervenes strategically to deepen student thinking and enrich the student to student discussion.
• Behind yet another door, students lean over a desk to examine an artifact, all deeply invested in the authentic product they are creating that they know is so much more than a simple “school task” and is used and valued in the real world. 
• Across the hall, students prepare for an exhibition and refer to the written feedback from their teacher as well as notes from peer feedback conversations to revise their work.  
• Yet another classroom is empty.  No, the students skipping class. They are out in the field, talking to experts, gathering data and evidence, investigating real-world problems they care deeply about.

Transformative learning experiences present students from every background and culture with challenges that have personal resonance, give them an entry point to complex material and provide them with opportunities to acquire skills that they want and need. They make schools vibrant and equitable places where all students have access to deep, meaningful learning and multiple pathways to success. 

Every student you meet is capable of extraordinary things. It’s up to us to ensure high school is a place worthy of our young people, honoring all that they are—and can be.

 In my next post, I’ll elaborate on the five key components of transformative learning experiences. See our newest paper for details: Making High School Meaningful.