Late last week a team of Homestead faculty members, along with a district-level administrator, a School Board member and me, visited two high-performing high schools in Michigan. Both schools, Seaholm in the Birmingham School District and North Farmington in the Farmington Hills School District, are in their fourth year of implementing the five-period trimester schedule. Currently, over one-third of all public high schools in Michigan are organized on the trimester.
The visits went off as planned, with team members having open access to administrators, support staff, students, school board members, counselors and teachers in the host schools. On both one-day visits, team members conducted spontaneous and scheduled one-on-one and/or group interviews with students and job-alike peers, visited classrooms, heard from the schools' principals, and learned about student performance data. Team members asked page upon page of questions and took extensive notes; the visits were truly rich learning experiences, ones that exeeded all of our expectations.
As we knew before scheduling the school visits, many high schools in Michgan transitioned to the trimester schedule in response to one or both of two conditions: revised state-mandated graduation requirements and/or significant budget reductions. Faculty members and administrators at both Seaholm and North Farmington were open about the fact that had circumstances not changed, each school would still be on its previous schedule (a seven-period modified block schedule in which classes met three times weekly, once for 50 minutes and twice for 90 minutes). The transition to the trimester was driven by necessity, not pure preference. As such, we expected some if not many people--especially those people still struggling to adjust to this change--to express mixed feelings about the trimester. As anticipated, we learned, as the saying goes, the good, the bad, and the ugly about the schedule during our visits.
On Friday of this week, members of the site visit team will share their findings with the HSST in greater detail. Out of respect for that group and its work, I am not providing any of that information here until after Friday's meeting. Nonetheless, I do know that members of the site visit team have been sharing informaton with students and teachers regularly. Over the course of my day today, for example, a number of teachers and counselors asked me about what I learned last week and about my reactions to what I saw and heard. I am confident that these inquiries were made to all other team members and will continue to be made in the days ahead.
While I will refrain from sharing details from the visit for the time-being, I will say that at the end of the trip all members of the team were informally polled, being asked one question: "Given what you learned over the past two days, should the five-period trimester remain a schedule of interest for the HSST?" While some people's opinions were stronger than others, all team members agreed that the trimester should continue to be investigated closely. It remains a schedule of high interest.
On Friday, the HSST will formalize next steps in the study process. Those next steps are all but sure to include two additional site visits. Those separate one-day visits will be to Neenah High School and West DePere High School, two solid schools in Wisconsin that currently implement the trimester, Neenah for the past 15 years and West DePere for the past seven. Unlike many of the schools in Michigan, Neenah and West DePere moved to the trimester schedule purely based on research, study and preference. They were not driven to the schedule by outside forces; as such, the visits are likely to have somewhat of a different tone than those that occurred in Michigan last week. Still, I expect a balanced appraisal of the trimester schedule and its impact on teaching and learning.
In later posts, I will provide details about the major findings and take-aways from the Michigan visits.
