Imagine if learning happened not just within the walls of a school — but also in communities — so students touch, hear, and see to experience learning first hand.
At A+ Unlimited Potential (A+ UP), an independent middle school in downtown Houston serving high-needs students, that’s the norm: students embrace learning from each other and from their city.
The three-year-old school encourages students to seek their own answers to problems in ways that are consistent with their own learning styles. A+ teachers don’t reprimand students for looking at their classmates’ work; rather they encourage students to collaborate.
The school is still new but it’s helping students to achieve positive results: 89% of students passed the state’s math assessment; in the first year, students achieved 2.5 years of growth in reading and math as measured by the Stanford 10 evaluation system.
A+ UP is scaling up based on its promising results. It is planning to become a charter school system of two campuses in August 2016 with a third opening in 2017, eventually growing from serving 40 students to serving 540.
“[The Board of A+ UP] saw a lot of kids were ill-prepared for the fast, shifting world of post-secondary work that colleges are now demanding, where a lot of work is online, and students are asked to decode and decipher limitless information, make sense of it, think about it critically, analyze and evaluate it and then create new work from it,” said Paul Castro, founding principal of A+ UP’s Museum District school and founding superintendent of the A+ UP charter school district. “But kids were never asked to do that in grades 6-12.”
At A+, homework is different than at other schools. Students are encouraged to use suggested online sources and find the answers on their own. They solve problems in self-created groups or alone, but each student is held accountable for learning the concepts.
“At the end of the day, our interest is not in channeling them into a specific resource set,” Castro explained. “Our interest is in asking them, ‘Can you prove that you’ve learned this?’”
When students run into challenges, teachers (known at A+ UP as “learning coaches”) design customized plans tailored to individual students to help them grasp the material.
“The magic we discovered was that empowering students is key,” said Castro. “We believe it’s very important to get kids to build their sense of community and lean on each other and themselves to become smarter and stronger in their own work. We learned the best way to do that is to play with how we structure work.”
What happens outside the classroom is just as innovative as what happens inside the classroom. Each A+ UP school is affiliated with a particular industry that is vital to Houston: energy, health care, and museums.
Through partnerships, A+ UP schools connect students with the city’s thinkers, researchers, and business leaders. Science lessons are supplemented by labs held at the city’s science museum, art classes are held at the Museum of Fine Arts, and history classes feature speakers from the Houston Holocaust Museum.
Looking ahead, Castro is hoping to have a big impact: “When we’re fully grown out, we intend to be a lab that others can come into, and be a part of, and ask the questions to see what they can take back to their respective campuses. We’ll be a school of 540 students that is modeling for 500,000 kids.”
