The XQ Institute

to be explored further. As you've heard, the original project in twenty eighteen stemmed from a grant students had won from the XQ Institute. Founded in twenty fifteen. XQ Institute is the nation's leading nonprofit organization dedicated to improving schools across the country. We thought it would be important to showcase the incredible work XQ is doing and give listeners a chance to figure out how they them selves can

get involved. I had a conversation with Anne McKinnon, a senior advisor, and Carrie Schneider, who works as head of Editorial and Publishing at XQ. You previously heard Carrie in episode three.

supporting schools that are doing very innovative things. We're working on learning experiences that will transform learning and and we have developed a design process that is community led that brings many, many more people into the process and the work of transforming high schools.

certain populations of students or some more than others. But we really believe that from an equity standpoint, from a preparing students for all the future has to offer a standpoint, and from communities really knowing what's best for the students that they serve, that folks can come together and get a big vision for what they hope high schools can be for those kids, so that they come out with everything you remember from high school, but also a whole

lot more so they come out as generous collaborators and original thinkers and critical thinkers. And in order for high school to accomplish those things beyond just you know, good grades on a test, learning has to look a lot

different while students are there. So when we talk about transforming high school, it's really transforming teaching and learning, getting educators the agency and the freedom to design lessons that really engage students, giving young people a voice and shaping what and how they learn, the really having the school match what the needs are of young people when they come out of high school and go onto their future.

that use time, space and technology in expansive ways. More recently, we've run similar competitions in the State of Rhode Island, all across the state of Rhode Island, with select schools in New York City and most recently in the District of Columbia. And what we've done in those areas is take schools where there was a critical mass of people who felt that they were ready to change their high

schools and make them more engaging and more modern. Students would graduate ready for the future and with a sense of what the future might hold for them, and school communities that felt they were ready decided to engage with us and went through a really really rigorous design process. There's a lot of knowledge out there about how high schools can and should change. It just isn't permeating necessarily

to all the places where it's most needed. So we've made those materials and the whole process available across the District of Columbia and in Rhode Island and have helped people come to a greater understanding of what they can do,

and they are doing extraordinary things. There are two schools in the District of Columbia that we selected as a result of the most recent process, and one of them is taking the concept of afrofuturism, an incredibly important intellectual and cultural concept, and making Afrofuturism the very center of the school and the theme around on which the school is organized. The other has organized itself around the theme

of entrepreneurship and financial independence for students who graduate. So what that means is that in both of those schools, educators, young people and community partners are designing learning experiences, reshaping the culture of the school.

be in their community. Whether that's afrofuturism, or whether that's community partnerships with industry in the area, or whether that's a school inside of a museum or a school that serves housing unstable students. It really is very different depending on the local context. But that's really the beauty of it. It's about really giving kids a voice and what they think they need to thrive in their communities after they finish, and really looking at bigger and contextual factors too, like

workforce development. There's a school in Indianapolis that really that whole high school was created out of knowing that the state was going toward renewable energy and wind and solar and a lot of things that they weren't graduating enough high school students to fill really high tech, stem, high

paying jobs. So I think it's just a lot of what we do is create the space and create the guides for those conversations to be had so that each community can form their own vision, and then we help them along the way with access to experts and other design tools and research and all of those pieces so that they can make those visions a reality.

So every one of our schools, all as different as they look, has been through a test for quality of their idea and their quite detailed proposal. So because there are certain common things that every school needs to do well, they don't need all to be done the same way, but they all need to be done well.

can actually happen anywhere. It's not just something that happens in big cities, or something that happens with a ton of support from people right in the community, or just you know, on different parts of the country. It really is happening everywhere in small pockets, And a big part of the work that we get to do is to find those examples and connect with them and learn from them so that we can tell others what they're doing and inspire more more work and more changes across the

country from their examples and from their stories. So I was really drawn to Elizabeth In for that exact small town a lot like the one I grew up in that proves that this kind of work can happen.

really struck by Elizabethton. I may even have been the person who brought Elizabethton to the attention of our final assessors, because they they scored well in the when they in their proposal. Their proposal scored well, but it was not in the very top top ones. But there was something just so special, so unusual about the way they put

their proposal together. It was twenty fifteen. In the fall we issued the challenge, and the challenge was, if you're interested in redesigning your high school, raise your hand, send us a quick concept, and we'll get back to you. So we were surprised we got seven hundred concepts. We were thinking we would get twenty or thirty, or maybe seventy or maybe one hundred. They came pouring in. We got seven hundred concepts, and we screened them really quickly

for those that wouldn't be possible. You know, we were only funding in the United States. We weren't funding parochial schools, so a few got told you know, sorry, but we don't want to disappoint you. Later, most of those concepts got a green light from us to go forward and create a design. So then they rapidly created a design, mostly through early twenty sixteen. Some of them got started earlier, but they came back from their holiday break and worked

really hard and put their proposals in. We got those in twenty sixteen. They went through a very rigorous judging process and all the selection process, and we were able to make the announcements in September of twenty sixteen. Some of the proposals were for brand new schools. Some of the more intriguing ones were for redesigns. They were existing schools where community people had come together and said we

want to change the way we do school. So no, it wasn't try to win millions of dollars to build to put a new wing on your school. It was take this money and think about what you'd really do to transform teaching and learning. Students really did the work, and those teachers, mister Campbell and mister Hensley, opened the door for students to do something really original, and they

they really did. They worked through every detail of our competition process and wrote really really original and interesting answers all of the questions that made up the proposal. They were really the only ones who did that, and that was entrepreneurial teachers who had a vision for a different, better way of learning. They had been talking about it theoretically among themselves for quite some time, and when one

of them saw our call for proposals, our original challenge. Well, the story that I've heard is that Dustin Hensley was looking for grants because he needed a new carpet for the library, and he came across the XQ opportunity and showed it to his friend Alex Campbell. And the two of them had been reading and talking together about the need to change high school for quite some time, and they said to each other, well, is it time to stop talking and start doing something? Should we give this

a try? And so they put this little concept in to just raise their hands and say they wanted to be part of it. And then when they heard back from us that their concept had been accepted, that's when they got really inspired and they said, if we really really mean what we've been saying, we would bring students into this process, and that's what they did. They organized, I think it was mostly mister Campbell, organized a spring semester course, an entire course, an elective for a group

of students around the EXQ proposal. And so they dug into the history of public education, what education is supposed to do, what high schools are supposed to do, how you could create a high school that really met all of their expectations. And they called it, confusingly for many people, they called it the Bartleby School, after the character in the Herman Melville story, the one who famously says, I would prefer not to over and over again to his boss.

And so they had kind of connected this idea that students had and that they felt was present in their students, that they would prefer not to have a boring education, They would prefer not to just learn out of textbooks and take quizzes and tests. They would prefer to do more.

And they produced a really good school proposal. They learned a lot about education at the same time, and so we were really pleased with what they'd done and felt proud of them and wanted to recognize the work that they had done and give them some money and some leeway to try to do more, which is exactly what they did. They're very entrepreneurial bunch. They will take what's available and turn it into gold over and over again.

schools that's often really stifled. So a big part of what we mean when we say high school transformation or what the original challenge in our ongoing work over the years intends to do is help people create the space for that curiosity and that passion and following interest and learning to be actually meaningful and engaging and attached to real life for young people. So I think it's really an example of where we know what young people need.

They know what they need, but the way schools are structured with kids in classrooms and kids following a bell schedule just isn't conducive to that. So you have teachers like those at Elizabethson but all over the place really getting creative about the way that they organize the day

or the way that they organize classers. They teach things in a more interdisciplinary way, or they have projects, and that really does create the space for kids to actually drive their own learning in a way that follows their curiosity, their passions and lets them explore who they are, which is ultimately what high schools can be.

and imagine who they might be. That's what prepares them for adult for college and for adult lives, and routine high school learning often doesn't let students develop identities that are lasting, that are authentic to who they are. The other is that we know that it's important for teenagers to have caring, trusting relationships in their schools, and many many schools and they large ones, obviously, but even some

smaller ones are pretty anonymous places for students. And one of the features of our schools, and one of the elements the design principles that we stress a lot, is the importance of caring, trusting relationships, and organizing the school so that adults really know students and care about them and can help them build their identities. That's one of

the things that Elizabethan is most outstanding at doing. They really know their students well, and they also create learning experiences where students can discover themselves, discover what they can do.

the work done that have calcified the system. That's why the typical bell system that sometimes exists in middle schools but is absolutely the standard in high school, where the day is broken up into blocks, where student learning is divided vertically into certain subject matter areas where they have to develop their capacities. High schools are very complicated expectations associated with standardized testing and with being ready for college.

All of those things create deep structures in high schools that are just difficult to budge. A lot of people want to make change, but they are working within a structure that's rigid and it's very hard to change.

it's not too late. As An has mentioned the science of learning and of adolescence at that time, it's the perfect time to really expose young people to new and different experiences so that develop who they are and they come out into the world as young adults really equipped to thrive. Instead of having just gone through the slog of high school and going, oh, check that box, I've

got a diplomb onto the next thing. But if you change high school, then that puts pressure on KA to make sure that students are coming in prepared for what the new high school experience will be. And then that puts pressure on the higher education system and the workforce to make sure that people are coming into jobs and careers and higher education with a whole new set of skills and experiences, so that higher ed will have to

change to accommodate that too. We say high school as a fallcroom for change, but really high school at the center. If you focus there, then that impacts KA and higher ed and across the system too.

most of higher education as well. It's also known as the credit hour, and what the Carnegie Unit did and what it continues to do, is equate learning with the amount of time that a student has sat in a class. So that's why we talk about the credit hour, which

is also called the Carnegie Unit. So this partnership with Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching gives us an opportunity to think about what would be a more appropriate way to measure and a credit learning that would be more flexible, that would measure learning as opposed to time

and a seat. And it sounds simple, but it's actually quite complicated to make change in this area because so much of our system is built around this unit that is probably invisible to many people, called the Carnegie Unit, but it is an assumption that is baked very deep into the way high schools are organized. We think that it's holding high schools back from the kinds of change

that they need to make. It really is time, it's possible, and it's time for us to be measuring student life, learning and attainment and not just how much time they've set it in a seat learning biology or learning world history.

So there might be a learning experience where students learn about the Harlem Renaissance, but because of the project that they're doing, they would also learn a great deal about collaboration and original thinking and research and other skills that are not necessarily covered by the academic standards, but that are equally important in the development of a whole human and so we're exploring what it means to create learning experiences that do all that.

to take up this work in their own communities. So I think when you ask what's next for us, it's continued work in both of those areas, supporting people doing the work and showing people what's possible so they can join us.

are not necessarily working alone. That One of the things that is special about Elizabethton is that they design projects where students can put their heads together, solve problems together, figure out a way to get things done as a team and also as individuals, and they have a spirit and a desire to get work done that has an

impact in the world. They bring a lot a lot of empathy to their work, and actually most students have a lot of empathy for the people in the world around them and want to put their creativity and their hard work to work on problems that matter. It's one of the things that we hear from students all the time that they want to be engaged in work that's really relevant and that's authentic and that is not just practice for the real world. They want to be engaging

with the real world right now. They did that in twenty sixteen when they put together a proposal for a school that really caught the attention of EXEQ, and they've done it over and over again in Elizabethton. Actually, that's what we gave them the grant to do that. That's what they said they wanted to do most of all, was create opportunities for students to do community projects, to serve their community, and they have found a multitude of ways to do that, and it's a very inclusive process.

It's all the students in that school are part of this ff for to have a different kind of experience in their high school years.

they're just kids. We really do believe in the potential of every young person and believe that high school can be a place to unlock that instead of a place

to stifle it. So I think that's something that the Elizabethan story really illuminates, because they were able to do things that adults weren't able to do, and they were able to accomplish things that went well beyond what you would ever think would happen in the context of learning and at the same time pick up all of the skills that are important coming out of high school, writing and researching and advocating for yourself and learning and all of that, but at the same time really grow as

individuals and as people. And that is an example from Elizabethton, But that's playing out in high schools all over the country, not just XQ schools everywhere.

phrase rethink high School across all of social media. That's an easy way to find us at XQ America across all socials too. We invite everyone to find a seat at the table with us. We do host challenges in districts and other communities based on some of that those conversations and really our work just continues to evolve to meet the needs of people in their communities and defining they are and how we can help. If you're interested in learning more about XQ, you can find us on

all the socials at XQ America. You can visit our website, which is XQ Institute dot org, or you can use the hashtag rethink high school across all the social platforms to find content and resources not just from us, but from educators and students all over the country that are sharing examples of the ways they're rethinking high school in their own communities.

of the following information. Number one, if you have any personal experiences with these victims that could help us tell their stories as real people. Maybe you grew up with them, worked with them, or are even related to them. If you can shed light on the investigations going back to the nineteen eighties, then maybe you worked with the cases, such as a police officer, or maybe you were a witness or even a journalist, that would also be very helpful.

And finally, if you have any information on our side suspect, maybe you grew up with him, you were in the military with him, incarcerated with him, or maybe involved with him through law enforcements such as his jailor guard or parole officer. All those things can be helpful. We would love to hear from any of you. You can reach us at info at ktdshstudios dot com, or message us through Instagram at kt Underscore Studios