Previously, Rindge was a typical vocational school. In the ninth grade, students rotated through different shops; then in the tenth grade they began vocational majors such as carpentry, electrical, automotive, and culinary. All of the academics were taught outside of Rindge, in other houses of the high school. (Years ago, the academics had been taught within Rindge. They were removed, largely as a budget-cutting tactic, but also in part due to criticism of the low academic quality.)
Beginning in 1991, the Rindge staff began forging new directions for vocational-technical education. Turning away from practices that, in effect, forced students to choose between college preparation and vocational skills, Rindge reshaped its program to prepare students for both work and further education. Preparing students for work includes, but goes beyond, preparing them to get jobs or even to have careers. The reform at Rindge sought to better enable students to take part in the life of their community--economic, political, and social--and to positively affect it.
Towards this end, changes at Rindge focused--and still focus--on three primary program goals:
To facilitate integration, vocational and academic staff began meeting daily to plan instruction. In order to create common time for planning and teaching together, the vocational shops were scheduled only for the afternoon so that all of the shop teachers were available for morning meetings and team-taught courses.
The first step in the overall reform of Rindge was that of completely redoing the ninth grade for 1991-1992. All Rindge freshmen were to take CityWorks, in which they worked on a variety of projects which related to the city of Cambridge and learned a combination of technical, academic, communications, and teamwork skills. Most of the projects were hands-on but also utilized academic skills such as writing, mathematics, research, and presentation.
Many of the CityWorks projects took students outside of the school to explore and analyze the city. One of the first experiences of a CityWorks student was the Walk Around the Block exercise in the fall. Students ventured forth in small groups, accompanied by a teacher, to investigate a small area near the school. They interviewed pedestrians (using survey questions they had prepared beforehand), took pictures, made measurements, and drew maps. Returning to the school, they created a presentation board showing the block.
In the course of the year, CityWorks projects introduced students to a variety of industries and taught an array of technical skills. Instead of doing so within a rotation-type exploratory, students learned within the context of exploring the city in which they lived and in doing real work that contributed to city improvement initiatives. For instance, the city of Cambridge was planning to build a heritage museum. Responding to a request from the city's tourist agency, teams of CityWorks students drew up designs for the museum. The students then exhibited their drawings and scale models and presented their plans, complete with location proposals and rationale, to parents, city officials, and local business people. In the process, students gained model-building and other technical skills, developed their communication abilities, and learned about the tourism industry (a major industry in Cambridge). Other students designed tours and wrote brochures for visitors. One featured places of interest to teens, another the best desserts in town, and another the efforts of a local hero. Students designed Cambridge t-shirts that the board of the city's tourist agency then adopted for sale and distribution. Other projects taught students electrical, carpentry, and additional technical skills.
As part of the overall reforms at Rindge, academics were brought back in-house, beginning with the ninth-grade program and the upper-grades internships (which gave both vocational and academic credit), and in 1993-1994, into the tenth-grade program. This made it possible to go much further in integrating vocational and academic learning. (In the future, more in-house academic classes may also be offered. A staff shortage--or rather, a lack of funding to pay staff--stands as the biggest hurdle to developing more integrated courses. As we discuss later in this chapter, there are also concerns about segregating Rindge students from the rest of the high school students if all of the former's academic classes are in-house.)
The ninth-grade academic components use the same theme of human and city development as the context for learning. The academic courses draw on the same hands-on skills being nurtured in CityWorks, blurring the line between vocational and academic courses. For instance, students in CitySystems, as a way to study life sciences and geometry (which gives mathematics and science credit), make models, using a variety of materials, of buildings and of human systems.
Although Rindge is not a member of the Coalition of Essential Schools (which is discussed later in this book), they closely follow the Coalition approach of "less is more," placing priority on helping students to learn to use their minds well by engaging them in a few, important ideas. To stimulate these "habits of mind," and to deepen the connections across vocational and academic courses, certain approaches and themes are used across courses--in addition to the theme of human and city development. The ninth-grade teachers have agreed that they want students to learn (and begin to apply) several key "ways of knowing" or approaches to continued learning and doing. For example, similar to the coalition's focus on Essential Questions, they want to help students learn to use a scientific method of problem posing and problem solving in all of their classes. In a variety of contexts, students are given problems and must ask themselves the following questions:
"What's the problem?"
"Why does it matter? Who cares?"
"How does it connect to other things I know?"
"How can I find out more about it? (Who can tell me? What can I read?)"
"How do I know who or what to believe?"
"What do I think is true about this problem?"
"Can I prove it?"
"What do I now know that I didn't before?"
"How can I teach others what I know or convince others I'm right?"
The junior and senior years at Rindge are now structured around four career paths: (1) Health and Human Services, (2) Arts and Communication, (3) Business and Entrepreneurship, and (4) Industrial Technologies and Engineering. Each path combines school-based learning with work-based learning. The career paths offer students opportunities to participate in school-based enterprises and to enter internships through which they can reinforce and extend their classroom learning and contribute to the revitalization of their community.
The school-based enterprises, such as the Cantabrigia restaurant, are particularly important as a setting for students to see how all the functions of a business fit together and to gain actual experience in all aspects of that industry. The internships utilize other strategies to help students build on their direct experiences. Students interning at Polaroid Corporation's research facility, Harvard University's Facilities Department, and local, public elementary schools participate in daily seminars that foster analysis of their experience and of the work setting through journal writing, complementary readings, and related projects. For example, students in the Careers in Education Program (part of the Health and Human Services career path) write every day in site logs at their internship sites. The seminar then builds other writing assignments on those entries; students write site log analyses, reflective pieces, and by the end of the year, autobiographies.
[1] A note on language: As teachers have worked to integrate vocational and academic learning at Rindge, both their roles and the content of the courses they teach increasingly defy categorization. However, city and state course credit systems still demand categories. In this chapter, the "vocational" and "academic" course labels signify credits, but they do not necessarily represent the entire content or goals. When applied to teachers, "vocational" and "academic" labels refer to training and previous experience. They are used in this chapter, not because they define who people are or what they do, but because it is interesting to know how people's backgrounds lend themselves to new opportunities.