Dr. Mariana (or Dr. M as the kids call her) is back this week to discuss our philosophy behind our biology curriculum. 

"Since leaving a career in research to work at Ideaventions, friends often ask me whether I miss the bench. The truth is, there are some aspects of research that I miss very much. I miss being on my feet all day, juggling different experiments to get that crucial piece of data. I miss the camaraderie that is born of shared experimental woes and long-awaited success. I miss the moment when the data comes together into a little nugget of knowledge worth sharing with other scientists. And so I am very excited that research will be an integral component of our biology curriculum! 

I feel very strongly about the importance of a true research experience in any scientific education. By its very nature, research provides a deep understanding of the scientific process. Students learn early on about the key elements of the scientific method: make an observation, formulate a hypothesis, carry out experiments, analyze results, and draw a conclusion. And yet engaging in research sheds a new light on this all-too-familiar scheme. Your initial observation may be due to experimental error, yet in pursuing this observation you may make a fascinating discovery. Your experiments may yield a surprising result, leading you down a novel research avenue. Your hypothesis may be proven wrong, taking you back to square one after months of effort. Scientific research is rarely a straight line from point A to point B (as many biology laboratory courses would have you believe), instead taking many twists and turns to reach an unexpected destination. 

Beyond key concepts and techniques, engaging in research teaches a unique skill set that will prove valuable regardless of career path. This skill set includes academic rigor, critical thinking, high ethical standards, and communication skills. Most importantly, research teaches perseverance and resilience. You may have heard that research is ninety percent failure - I can attest to the validity of that statement. The brilliant experiment you spent a week designing will most likely fail to give any conclusive results. If by any chance your experiment does work as expected, the initial promising result will be irreproducible. Both scenarios lead to months of optimization and troubleshooting, all in search of that elusive eureka moment every scientist lives for. 

Finally, becoming an active member of a research community reveals that science is a profoundly human endeavor. The rivalries! The backstabbing! The money to be made! Like all of us, scientists are misled by their hopes, their biases, and their ambitions. Well-acknowledged scientific "facts" have been proven wrong, and long ridiculed theories are now written in textbooks. This is not a flaw of the scientific process, but rather an inescapable reality that we must be aware of. 

Our biology curriculum will draw on a variety of resources to cover five main areas of study: ecology, cell and molecular biology, genetics and evolution, plant biology, and human body systems. As part of our year-long biology course, students will work on an unanswered biological question in one of the above areas of study. Some areas - such as evolution and human body systems - will be difficult to study in the Academy setting due to practical and ethical constraints. Other areas - such as ecology, plant biology, and cell biology - will be better suited to student-led research projects. Our ultimate goal will be to make a meaningful contribution to the scientific body of knowledge, while learning key biological concepts and acquiring a variety of lab techniques. By participating in original research, we hope that students will be inspired to learn independently and experience first-hand the joy of discovery. I look forward to guiding the young scientists in their investigations!"

Community. Merriam-Webster defines community as “the people living in a particular area.”
Community Service. Oxford Dictionary defines community service as “voluntary work intended to help people in a particular area.”

It was with these definitions in mind that we defined the Community Service curriculum, which broadened how one usually thinks of community service. Being a new school we’re building a community from the beginning. This community is made up of our students, our faculty and our students’ families, and before we can begin to impact our broader community, we have to build our own community.

The learning objectives for Community Service are three-fold:

1. Learn to be a contributing member of the Ideaventions Academy community
   
2. Learn that we are part of a broader local community, national community and global community
   
3. Gain exposure to skills necessary to impact one of the communities to which we belong

Ideaventions Academy Community
We will spend the first two months of the school year focused on laying the foundation for the Ideaventions Academy community. After the initial two months, each Community Service class will include a lesson in how to be a member of our school community.

We are very excited that our inaugural class of students will have the opportunity to shape the Academy through the creation of our Honor Code. Students and faculty will work together to learn about ideals, honor, integrity, and trust, then using this knowledge, draft a code that will withstand the test of time and that we can abide by as a community.

By the end of the first two months, students and faculty will know and understand the expectations of being a contributing member of this amazing community. Our community’s expectations on compassion, respect, bullying, acceptance, friendships, honesty, and choices will be worked and defined by students and faculty to lay the foundation for the rest of the year.

After the initial two months, we will lead short, 20-minute lessons on more nuanced skills that reinforce the work done. Topics of these lessons will range from understanding stress and anxiety within oneself, to sharing, be it a lab tool or credit in a scientific publication, to how to handle exclusion in a group. The spectrum of topics covered will create the glue for this tight-knit community.

Broader Community
Once we have defined what it means to be part of the Ideaventions Academy community, we can then venture out to begin to impact the broader community. The broader community can be our local Reston community, our state, our country or our global community. The possibilities are endless. Through this work, we’ll always look at the geographic area that we’re influencing and the communities that we hope to help.

An aspect of the curriculum is to introduce students to the wide range and scale of causes, which include pollution, animals, poverty, and natural disasters. As part of the selection of a service project and background research, students will learn about the various social causes and gain an appreciation for the diversity of communities.

Impacting Communities
This is the area of the curriculum that most people think of when one mentions Community Service. Our goal is to teach students the skills that they need to make an impact. Many of these skills are transferrable to entrepreneurship and other professional communities like the scientific community.

As students may be working in a class of eight to ten students, it is not feasible to run eight to ten separate community service projects. Instead, we’ll be using a framework that mirrors the “real world.” We want students to feel empowered and to have choices. Therefore, we will not be dictating the project that they will undertake.

Every student in the class will draft a proposal for the project of their choice. Students will create rating criteria that will be used. Each student will then blind-rate all of the other project proposals based on the agreed-upon criteria. One or two project proposals from the class will be selected as the class project(s) for the year. By being active participants in this multi-step process, students commit to the choice for the class and learn how to evaluate potential work, as well as their own. The method for choosing the project(s) mirrors the grant process for a non-profit, the funding process for a research project or the venture capital process in a start up.

The next phase is project execution or implementation. In addition to actually doing the project, in this phase of the project, we learn about planning, marketing, funding or fundraising, goals, project roles, unintended consequences, and documentation.

Finally, we either complete the project or we decide to sustain the project into the future.

In conclusion, from this curriculum and experience, we believe that students:

• will learn effective social and entrepreneurship skills,
  
• will create a school community that they look forward to being a part of everyday,
  
• will understand and appreciate the work necessary to make a positive impact on an important, but often ambiguous, undefined community issue and
  
• will experience the satisfaction of helping others.
  

Testing is a loaded and political term in today’s educational system and with today’s post, I am officially entering the ring.

Luckily, for purposes of discussing our testing philosophy, I can focus the discussion based on the parameters of Ideaventions Academy.

Background
People’s opinions are shaped by their environment and experiences and when the word test in an educational setting comes up, it evokes feelings of anxiety and judgement in me. I can only remember one test in all of my schooling career that I enjoyed. It was in college in one of Bob Solow’s Macroeconomics classes where in working through the problems and questions, the sequence of the questions, drew parallels to the events leading to the collapse of the Mexican economy in the 1990s. However, at the time, I was just thankful that another semester of final exams were over, but the “Aha!” moment in the middle of that exam will always stay with me.

A defining moment for me was a few years ago when my older son took the SCAT test for admissions into Johns Hopkins CTY program. We took the test at a testing center with adults who were there for professional certifications. After the test was complete, we got into the elevator with a woman who had completed a certification exam and as the doors to the elevator closed, my son said, “That was fun! Can we do it again?” It took the elevator-ride down to pick both of our jaws up off the floor. Since high-pressure testing had never been part of his Montessori education, this was a fun time to do some math and answer language questions. His experience and attitude towards this standardized test got me thinking and changed my point of view: If you haven’t been conditioned for tests to be stressful, they can provide meaningful information without impacting the learning process.

Fast forward four years….

As an educator and administrator, these are some goals and questions for each individual child:

• Did this child understand my lesson?
  
• Did the class understand this unit?
  
• Am I moving too slowly? Too fast?
  
• Does the student understand these concepts well enough to be able to draw from them next year? In two months? Next week?
  
• How is this student’s pace of learning? Linear curve? Exponential growth? Plateau?
  

In looking at these questions, two types of assessments come out - the day-to-day classroom assessment and a broader annual benchmark.

Everyday
There is a certain level of assessment that is constantly occurring in the classroom. With a small group of 8 students, teachers will engage students in casual conversation while they work to figure out what they have taken away from the lesson. Therefore, in a 1.5 hour class of 8 children, each student should have an opportunity to interact individually with the teacher for at least 5-7 minutes.  

Assessing students’ mastery of material can also come in many forms that don’t have to be tests. As an alternative to tests, student projects and presentations can be a great way to find out what students learned, but do require carefully designed project guidelines or rubrics. Or if you want to see what the class remembers from a prior unit, it can be done in the form of a game. In another scenario, having a student explain what they are working on, can tell a teacher a lot about their thought process and if they understand what they are doing and most importantly why - learning with a purpose. Creating a portfolio of work is an ideal way for children to demonstrate what they know and what they like while building skills that they will use for the rest of their professional lives. 

Global Teacher Prize winner, Nancie Atwell, said it best in the Education Week blog "We really need to be looking at what individual kids are achieving in the disciplines, authentically and personally."

Benchmarks
The other category is standardized or grade-normed tests. I struggled with this because I can see the effects of the stress and pressure placed on students and teachers alike. However, the scientist in me also values the information they provide.

I find the results of these types of tests more useful when the child is benchmarked against him or herself over time. Because each child comes from a different starting point, standardized assessments tell us the trajectory of the child’s learning year over year.

When I see a standardized test result of a student who gets 99% across the board, the first question I ask myself is how would she have done if given this test at the beginning of the year? Is this child a candidate for further acceleration? You get a very different picture if a student scores 40% at the beginning of the year and ends up with a 99% compared to a student that came in with a 94% and ended up with a 99%. And if I give them an above grade-level test at what grade does this student start scoring below 80% or 60%? I view these types of tests as data points that help parents, teachers and the school learn more about the learning needs of the individual child.

Additionally, if  scores are collected and compared across multiple years, then one is able to determine areas where the child has made more progress or where progress has slowed down.  We can further examine those areas to try to understand the trend and any potential actions to take.

The key here is the individual child. Taking the time to analyze the test data over time for the individual child, can turn that data into insights for developing a challenging environment for that child or catch areas that need to be addressed.

To summarize, I believe that day-to-day assessments and evaluations should be done informally through the use of projects, presentations, games or quizzes without the stress of grades tied to them. I also believe that standardized testing, when the data is used to evaluate a child’s progress over time, can be helpful in understanding a child’s learning needs.