Weekly Message from Head of School 2024/6/10-2024/6/14
Dear Keystonians,
I hope you and your families enjoyed the dragon boat festival last weekend! The week at school has flown by with the fabulous Art Week Activities and celebrations! Thanks to the PAC team and all the students and teachers who have made the week so fun and filled with beautiful art!
Last week I shared a little bit about the history of the system of “credit hours” and “Carnegie Units” which were designed to create a model of secondary school that was efficient in the administration and credentialing of students and school programs.
This system has proven to be very difficult to change because it created a simple and elegant standardization across schools within--and even between--nations. In many ways, a high school education in China is more similar than it is different to high school education in most other countries in the world. And although schools tend to be full of teachers who have a sense that there could be a better way of educating than counting seat time as learning, it feels like it is difficult to make the changes we know are right for students because of the issues of communicating the learning in a way that would be as simple and elegant as the traditional high school transcript (based on seat time and numeric or letter grades). The structures established in the late 1800s and early 1900s constrained educational innovation for over a century.
Around 10 years ago, Scott Looney, Head of School at the Hawken School in Cleveland Ohio began to wonder if he could do something to improve the experiences for his students by tinkering with what he saw as the problematic traditional transcript. What he heard when he asked college admissions officers about this idea was that they would not want to consider a new kind of transcript invented by a single school—it would just be too much work for them to figure it out. But they told him if lots of high-quality schools got together and came up with something, maybe it could work.
In 2016 I was excited to be one of the school leaders from across the US invited to a meeting Scott held in Cleveland to discuss this idea. “How cool would it be,” he asked “if we all got together and leveraged our schools’ strong reputations to create a transcript that would communicate and promote the type of learning we want to see happening in our schools, the type of learning that we know our students need to be successful?”
I remember the whole room leaning in, excited about the possibilities. For two days we daydreamed about the opportunity to create a system that allowed our teachers and students to focus on learning--not grades--and freed them from the tyranny of a narrow definition of success, without compromising their ability to get accepted to highly selective colleges and universities.
To deepen our thinking, we spent an afternoon at the Lerner School of Medicine, the Medical School attached to the Cleveland Clinic, one of the top teaching hospitals in the world. There we heard from medical students who were learning in a competency-based model (no grades or seat-time, no Carnegie units), which is very prevalent in medical schools in the US. After having graduated from some of the most prestigious colleges and universities in the world, these students talked about how it wasn’t until medical school that they started really learning for learning’s sake. In the competency-based system, they began to see feedback as a tool to improve and deepen their learning, as opposed to a summative communication of their performance to be nervous about. They described being hungry for feedback because they knew it would make them better doctors. It was a feeling we all knew we wanted to hear more of in our primary and secondary schools. We wanted students to learn for learning’s sake and see feedback the way the medical students did—as supportive of their learning, and not just summative and evaluative.
We all left the meeting invigorated (and daunted) about the possibility of creating a transcript based on skills and competencies and not seat time in courses. After this meeting in the Spring of 2016, the Mastery Transcript Consortium began in earnest. As a Board Member of the MTC, in 2017 I traveled to New York with Mr. Looney to pitch the idea of the MTC to the EE Ford Foundation (a foundation that supports collaborative innovation efforts in private schools). The EE Ford Foundation awarded the MTC a $2 million dollar grant—the largest in the foundation’s history—to launch the exciting work of the MTC to change the way that students prepare for college and for life. The MTC was off and running!
I continued to serve on the MTC Board until I moved to China in 2022. To date, around 500 colleges and universities have accepted Mastery Transcripts (see list here) and hundreds of schools have been able to transform the experiences of students to be more competency and skills based, more effective and learner centered.
In the past month, MTC became part of Educational Testing Services (ETS), the massive global company behind tests like TOEFL and the GRE. ETS’ interest in the MTC came from their efforts in collaboration with the Carnegie Foundation—the same group that started this whole mess with their Carnegie unit in 1906—to reshape the future of learning around competency and skills based assessments.
This is all very exciting for the future of education that these ideas are scaling so successfully and so quickly. Earlier this semester, some other Keystone Leaders and I had a great conversation in this area with some leaders of the IB Organization—they are also deeply invested and keenly curious about how schools can continue to be more and more effective and student-centered and are promoting some important research and exploration of their own in this area.
What do you think about this? What do you wonder? How might some of these ideas play a role in helping Keystone continue to explore what it means to be a New World School, for China? I look forward to chatting with many of you about this and other strategic questions!
Wishing you all a peaceful weekend!
Yours,
Emily
