Brightworks

When we envision a well-rounded, progressive education for our kids, we think of a vibrant environment that nurtures students’ passions, provides structure for rich and deep learning, a place where kids can get their hands on projects that are meaningful to them.

That’s the goal at Brightworks, a small, K-12 private school just starting its second year in San Francisco: to re-imagine traditional modes of education so that curiosity and creativity hold sway over standardized tests and worksheets. But in the course of creating this space for students’ interests, the school has also had to refine some of its original ideas to make room for realities like assessments and how to group students.

Brightworks first opened last fall, billed as a progressive school that allows kids to follow their own passions. It’s organized very differently from traditional schools. Teachers are known as “collaborators” and the curriculum is centered on “the Brightworks arc,” which divides learning into three phases – exploration, expression, and exposition – based on a central theme. The students explore a theme, design projects around that theme, then present their work to the community. The idea is that these projects – such as building a wooden stage for a play they’ve written or using aerial silks to demonstrate kinetic energy – provide the context for learning core academic skills.

As with every experiment, the first year has provided plenty of opportunities for refining, according to founder and co-director Gever Tulley.

“It’s been a great year. We’ve had great moments and we’ve had hiccup-y moments,” Tulley said.

Or as one parent, Amanda Moore, puts it, “It’s been everything we expected and nothing we expected.”

CREATING A STRUCTURE

While the school still follows the basic “arc” structure it started with, Tulley says there have been a lot of refinements. One major change has been how students are grouped. The year started with kids of all ages — six to 12 — working together on everything. But that proved problematic. What’s easily graspable to a 12-year-old might be far over the head of a six-year-old, and what might be new and interesting to a six-year-old could bore a 12-year-old. Now, students are grouped into age-based cohorts, or “bands,” so that age-appropriate work could move along more smoothly.

What happens during the day is more or less fluid at Brightworks — in fact, a typical day is hard to describe, as the school values spontaneity and student-directed work. Overall the typical structure involves a few key parts: 1) Morning Circle, when the entire school gets together to check in and make announcements; 2) “band” meetings, or small-group reflections where students check in with one another and the teacher about where they’re at in a certain project arc and what they plan to do that day; 3) Exploration or Expression phase activities, often involving a field trip or a visit from a professional in some field; and 4) Closing Circle time when the entire school gathers again to reflect and part ways.

The Brightworks Arc

Tulley admits that the collaborators still struggle with the most appropriate way to integrate core academics into project work. “You don’t want to compromise the quality of the project phase by cramming a math exercise into it,” he says, but there are still plenty of teachable moments (building wooden structures involves math, for example) and collaborators are trying to build their knowledge base and comfort zones around those.

MEANINGFUL ASSESSMENT

“We’re still in a lot of discussions about meaningful ways to assess children without the harm of grading and testing,” Tulley says, adding that many students at traditional schools have optimized the ability to cram for a test, then to purge the information post-test. “I think that’s something that we’ll develop over time.”

Student assessment at Brightworks takes the holistic approach. At the end of last year, teachers pored over student work, progress, accomplishments, behavior, and everything else that contributed to a student’s experience and put together a two- to three-page narrative assessment sent home to parents. These assessments were specifically tailored to each student, but were based on a template that Brightworks staff put together based on “all of the things we want our students to eventually be,” says Director Ellen Hathaway — including qualifications in academic areas.

The assessments covered three areas: students’ project-based learning, social and emotional learning, and skills acquisition and quantitative learning, according to Program Coordinator Justine Macauley. “Rather than assessing the students’ work product, we looked at their work and development during the process of their project,” asking questions like, Are they a supporter of other students’ projects or do they spearhead their own? Do they listen to others? Do they self-advocate? What subject areas do they gravitate to? and How adept is the student at organizing him/herself, their projects, their process?

This coming school year, staff will be looking at the same three areas broadly, but with more specific focus on certain areas depending on the projects and the arc topic, Macauley said.

Another change is the frequency in assessments: They’ll happen three times a year, instead of just once, which Hathaway says will be more effective and far easier for teachers to manage.

A YEAR IN REVIEW

Many parents and collaborators are excited to be part of the growing Brightworks community and are surprised by the positive effects the school has had on its students. Others are skeptical about both the model and its execution. Does this open-ended, student-driven approach mean that kids aren’t learning core academic skills? Is there too much time for free play? Are there adequate assessments in place so that learning can be measured?

One of the critics, who commented on the previous article on Brightworks, responded to a few questions via e-mail on the condition of anonymity. Despite an appreciation for the school’s mission, the commenter — who claims to be familiar with the inner-workings of the school — finds that the departure from traditional curriculum at Brightworks forgoes academic rigor, daily structure, and basic classroom management. “Children need schedules to feel their environment is a safe and predictable place,” the commenter said, adding that there may be “students as old as 10 who don’t know how to do multiplication or how to use a dictionary. “There are basic skills we need as adults to succeed in our culture, like critical thinking, analyzing, evaluating and synthesizing information.”

These are common concerns when teachers and parents investigate a model like Brightworks. Is it okay to let a child learn to read and to do basic math later than what’s typically done in traditional schools? Do students exercise critical thinking and analysis at Brightworks, or does the lack of structure inhibit learning?

For Amanda Moore, a teacher whose daughter is six and attends Brightworks, the results are evident in what she sees everyday. “The real feature of my day is that I show up at 3:30 and she does not want to leave. She feels empowered by her education. She understands that she’s responsible for things,” Moore says.

Brightworks

Students work on projects throughout the school day.

Adds Tulley, “Each child has his or her personal narrative through the school. That seems to be working really well. They each have an individualized experience. It feels like they have a story to tell; it feels personal.”

That’s also important for parent Angela Wall, whose nine-year-old will attend Brightworks this fall. During the past few years while her daughter has attended traditional schools, Wall says she would see her “flourish during vacations in developing her curiosity and seemingly become frustrated” during the school year. “I want her to be set up with a lifelong love of learning,” Wall says. “And I’m not convinced that the education she’s currently involved with is doing that. I see it squashing some of her passions, slowly.”

Wall says she arrived at Brightworks as a huge skeptic, grilling the collaborators and founders about academic skills, assessment, and even college admissions without standardized tests (although apparently, Brightworks has been talking with Stanford University about providing different admissions requirements for students who’ve been schooled in alternative ways). And she left feeling “very very inspired and ignited intellectually,” finding that Brightworks prioritizes collaboration between students and the ability to tackle a problem, embrace failure, and try again above all else – key skills in a collaborative age.

NOT FOR EVERY CHILD

Still, this school is not for every child, nor every parent, and part of Brightworks’ struggle is to accurately assess a kind of educational model that doesn’t have much precedent. “What we’re trying to develop is something difficult to test: the habits and abilities of a lifelong learner, someone who seeks challenge and enjoys looking at topics that they haven’t encountered before,” Tulley says.

Though for some parents, this kind of experimentation is worrisome, for parents like Amanda Moore, it’s ideal. “My six-year-old is learning how to draw a bird,” she says. “She’s learning math by measuring a wing span. I’m less worried about her being able to meet a reading benchmark. The question is, can she meet a challenge?”

Above all, says Tulley, Brightworks’ commitment to grow and evolve in conversation with its parents and community will be the key to its success. This coming year will involve more vetting and relationship-building with some of the professionals and experts they’ve brought in to collaborate with educators, for instance. They’ll also bring in a fresh crop of educators to accommodate a few more students and develop a more focused, pre-planned Brightworks arc.

“It may all fail,” says parent Angela Wall, who has committed to trying Brightworks for a year. “But I also want my daughter to know that people fail – and that when you go through failures, you figure out how to move on.” Sure, she says, “I’m taking a leap of faith with this school. But I’m willing to take that leap.”

Flickr: tinkering-unlimited

At Brightworks, a K-12 private school set to open in San Francisco this fall, there will be no tests, grades, or transcripts.

Instead, students will participate in activities and interact with professionals in various fields, design a project that they bring to fruition themselves, and produce a multimedia portfolio that they’ll share with the school, the community, and – via the Brightworks website – the world.

Brightworks is co-founded by Gever Tulley, creator of Tinkering School (a sleepover summer camp where kids explore and build things) and author of 50 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do, and Bryan Welch, director of A Curious Summer (theme-based workshops for kids that spark curiosity and critical thinking).

The philosophy at Brightworks builds on the approaches to learning that Tulley and Welch have developed and tested through their respective summer programs, and the premise is simple: Get students passionate about something (read “The Nine Tenets of Passion-Based Learning to learn more”), then set them loose to explore and enact that passion.

“What’s been happening with A Curious Summer since I’ve been running it,” says Welch, who co-founded the program with Marina McDougall, art projects director at the Exploratorium, “is that we will pickle these children in curiosity. We’ll get calls from parents months after the camp, saying, ‘After taking your workshop in stop-motion and photography, my child can’t stop playing with optics.’ It can be problematic, even: Kids go back to school pickled in curiosity and that might supercede what they’re being offered at school. So I felt like, wouldn’t it serve our children better if we could then give them tools and materials and let them do their own work?”

BrightWorks

Isaac is determined to leave the ground, by any means necessary. Aka - jumping.

He thought that Tinkering School could benefit, if prior to arriving, children could develop a passion on a certain theme at A Curious Summer and drive the tinkering themselves. “At Tinkering School, children arrive not knowing what they’re going to do,” says Welch. “Gever whips off the tablecloth and says, ‘These are the tools and materials I challenge you with and this is what I challenge you to build.’ But wouldn’t it be better if the children said, ‘We challenge ourselves’?”

The result of this fusion is Brightworks, a school where children will get to spark their enthusiasm on a certain theme and tinker with it year-round, using what Tulley and Welch call “the Brightworks arc,” a curriculum with three phases: 1) exploration, 2) expression, and 3) exposition.

This means that if the year’s theme is “wind,” for instance, Brightworks students will look at wind from many disciplines and angles, such as meteorology, wind instruments, wind as an element in the body in Chinese medicine, sailing as a method of wind-powered transportation, or nautical history and the way wind has fueled colonialism and changed the way languages and cultures interact in the world.

The teachers (or “collaborators,” as they’ll be called at Brightworks) will populate this vast thematic landscape with exploratory activities and professional expertise. “Let’s bring in a pilot. Let’s bring in a kite flyer. Let’s bring in a wind musician,” says Welch. “And we want them to bring the real tools and materials that they use” in their careers in an effort to “dismantle the membrane that so often in traditional schools keeps children and expertise separate.”

The project that the students subsequently design, Welch says, can be absolutely anything that deepens their understanding of the theme – from building a sailboat to writing a rock opera about Amelia Earhart. “The kingdom of childhood is this place where we can actually support this incredibly experimental work,” he says.

And in the third phase, students will share their work with a “legitimate audience” – not just their classmates, but also, for instance, the elderly at a local assisted living center, a class of kindergartners, or students at U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education.

The school, though private, will offer sliding-scale tuition to every applicant, effectively allowing for half the tuition to be given away. And the hope is that as soon as things get rolling, Brightworks will be able to offer sliding-scale after school programs, workshops, and night classes for children and adults in the neighborhood, too.

Sure, there are only 30 students aged 6 through 12 starting in September (though there are a few slots still open for 12-year-old girls) and the teacher-to-student ratio at Brightworks is a minimum of 1 to 6. The program is resource and labor-intensive. “We don’t scale well at all,” says Welch.

But they plan to replicate through offering their curriculum as an open-source platform online and building their reputation throughout San Francisco. This is something they’re already doing. Tulley and Welch have already received plenty of calls from other educators asking how they could build their own Brightworks school.

Also, Welch says, the development of the school’s structure was hugely influenced by the nearly 200 home visits he made to explain its mission and methods to local parents. “We’ve created, in dialogue with these families, a much more full-fleshed version of our school,” he says. And at this point, “it’s as full-fleshed as it can be for a school that hasn’t started yet.”