Debriefing Conversations With A "Genius"

In my last post I mentioned that KSTF brought in MacArthur Genius Amir Abo-shaeer, who, among other accomplishments, started an Engineering Academy at his school in California. I will admit, I was skeptical at first. That doesn’t sound all that amazing, right? I mean, I have known KSTF fellows who have started engineering programs at their schools. But after I herad him speak to the whole crowd after lunch, I realized this guy really has a fresh approach and something to say. There was an opportunity to attend a Q&A session later on, after which I stuck around to ask him more questions. He and I stood outside the ballroom chatting it up, while we both missed the subsequent speaker, whom we were all slated to attend. Here are a smattering of things I understood from those conversations:

Project-oriented not Unit/Standard-oriented. His curriculum is fundamentally different from any curriculum I've heard of (though I will admit this thought has occurred to me and I dismissed it as impossible), in that he teaches big projects that require an understanding of a variety of physics principles. So each project might have elements from what would otherwise be more than one "unit", but over the course of the year, all the projects will have required any understanding of all the physics principles normally covered in a physics class.

Depth not Breadth. To be fair, he doesn't cover a ton of principles, but he does go into the ones he does cover in detailed depth.

**New thought: I need to create an Alumni survey for those students who come back to visit, to assess what pieces students remember, found useful, did they remember the concepts they learned when they needed them in class? Did they end up referencing my notes at all? What was the most memorable thing from their physics class experience?

No Throw-Away Projects. He only has students do projects that for which the end result is something of an extremely high quality. For example, he has students create a baby mobile, that's so cool looking that they can be sold in a toy store, or auctioned and the money given to a local charity. People want these things. He also has them create a water feature. These items can go for up to $500, but the pieces to create them cost as little as $35. These are items that students, again, could sell they are of such high quality. One of his students reflected to him that after this kind of project he said, "After experiencing this course, I realize that the rest of my education up until this point has been worthless." That's a great endorsement for his course, but not necessarily what we're going for. Amir came to education from mechanical engineering, and he reflected that if we have these students for 13 years and professionals have come to expect that by the end of those years they essentially know NOTHING. That is unacceptable. He thought about it in terms of "man-hours" and if he was an employer with access to this kind of resource he would certainly be using it to do something productive in the world.

Tutoring Model: Some of his students needed funds to travel for a physics competition, but they couldn't afford the trip. They could've just set up a car wash, but instead he set up a tutoring program. So donor's dollar does 3 things: it helps he kid go to the competition; it helps a student who needed the tutoring, it pushes the tutoring student to know the material better and be an educational leader. Why let your dollar only do one thing? 3 birds. 1 dollar.

Follow Up: If donors support a project at the end of the project he spends like $35 on a nice frame and put together a digital collage of pictures of the project and types up a nice letter thanking the donor to go with the pictures. Of course the business ends up hanging it up somewhere in their office, and people see that. He sees this as an investment in future projects.

PR: Every single project he does he gets PR for. A team of students writes press releases and they make t-shirts. Students also meet with donors. But of course he was trying to raise 3 million dollars for his new institute. I'm not sure I need to do that. But I would like to have students write press releases. What a great natural authentic assessment.

Non-Profits Should Have Some Overhead. The backstory here is that he started a non-profit specifically to fund his classes. But I'm applying it to the non-profit I work with, the Vermont Sustainable Heating Initiative. Getting to the point: large-scale donors want to see that you have low overhead, but not NO overhead. The Vermont Sustainable Heating Initiative currently donates ALL of the funds it receives to helping low-income families. He confirmed something I have suspected for a while. We need to stop doing our own books and actually PAY someone else to do that for us.

I'm sure there are probably other things that soaked in, but those are the things I can think of for now. Clearly I have a lot of work to do before school starts! :)

For a little more info on Amir Abo-Shaeer check out these youtube interviews or check out the book written about him and his classes: The New Cool