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Respect and empathy are a big part of Rocketship's school culture.

Ask little Peter Cournoyer, a second-grader at Rocketship Mateo Sheedy, what empathy means, and he describes it this way:

“It’s when you help someone if they need help or if they get hurt,” he says, (which he’s had to do a few times).

Empathy is one of Rocketship’s four “core values,” in addition to respect, responsibility, and persistence, which define the school’s culture and identity. The words are plastered all over the school’s walls as a reminder and reinforcement.

From the staff’s perspective, these values do more than just move students forward academically, says Joya Deutsch, a principal-in-training who will open a fourth Rocketship campus next fall. “It’s also about building character,” she says. “When they leave the fifth grade, we want them to be able to not just engage in middle school, but to be able to be successful as citizens in the community.”

Teachers hand out rockets for good behavior in class and all around school — a purple “Value” rocket for showing empathy, for example, when a friend falls on the playground and they help out. The rockets can then be redeemed for raffle or prize at the end of the week.

Intangible values like empathy and persistence can be woven through the school’s culture by reinforcing good behavior and by setting examples. But how do you teach critical thinking?

“The stuff that doesn’t get measured, but frankly is what makes people successful in life is critical skills thinking,” said Judith McGarry, spokesperson for Rocketship. “It’s the ability to ask questions, to probe, to think creatively and to really understand the ‘why’ of something. There aren’t any standardized tests that measure that.”

At this school, teachers use what they call “Rocketeer Reasoning”: a set of questions that can be applied to almost any content they learn, like “Why are we learning this?” or “How is this important”?

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Second-grader Peter Cournoyer learns about empathy at Rocketship.

“We teach them to be meta-cognitive about what they learn,” says literacy teacher Jaclyn Vargas.  “My fifth-grade students are leaving and going to all different kinds of middle schools next year. I don’t have control over their educational experiences from this point forward, so I want them to develop not only critical thinking skills, but also dispositions and attitudes toward learning that they’ll take with them regardless of their educational setting.”

Students are also expected to “dress for success” in crisp uniforms. “They should look professional, with their shirts tucked in, because this is essentially their job to be a student right now. So we’re teaching them to understand what it means to be successful when they’re adults, as well,” Deutsch says.

And of all this ties together with the pervasive emphasis on self-confidence. One of the many signs around the school states: “Our background or neighborhood doesn’t mean we aren’t smart.”

COLLEGE BOUND

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University flags ring the school's cafeteria and Learning Lab to reinforce its college-bound culture.

Students’ paths to college is firmly laid at Rocketship from the time they start kindergarten. Each class is assigned a specific university and named after its team: the Long Horns, the Tarheels, the Golden Bears, for instance. And those schools’ flags are hung along the entire perimeter of the Learning Lab/cafeteria where students congregate multiple times a day.

Every fall, the school takes a pilgrimage to a university. Last September it was to the University of California, Santa Cruz. Eleven school buses were filled to capacity with students and parents from the three Rocketship schools – more than 1,000 people in total.

“We had five-year-olds asking questions about what they need to do to prepare themselves to come to this school,” said Preston Smith, co-founder and Chief Achievement Officer of Rocketship. Kids and parents were playing soccer on the field and soaking up the collegial atmosphere.

For many of them, both parents and teachers, it was their first time on a college campus – ever. “What we want to do is help them visualize, ‘This is what’s in store for your kids. This is what you should expect from your child,’” McGarry said.

PARENT PARTICIPATION

Cultivating a strong connection between the school and parents is another top priority at Rocketship. School administrators and teachers must maintain a close relationship to ensure that expectations of each student is the same at home as it is at school.

In addition to a home visit once a year, teachers and administrators find ways to involve parents in the school — which can be difficult, since most of them have not one, but two jobs in this working class community. Still, the school encourages parents to volunteer about 30 hours per year.

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One of many motivating signs around the school.

During my visit a few weeks ago, I met several parent volunteers who were helping in the cafeteria, as well as monitoring the Learning Lab. Some of them started out as volunteers but are now employed by the school.

“We try to provide a medley of opportunities for parents to get involved,” McGarry said. “For example, one of our parents is a terrific contractor. He has come in and done his volunteer hours by helping us with various projects around the school. So we’re very sensitive to the fact that parents can’t come during working hours because they’re working people.”

Parent participation goes beyond volunteering at school. In addition to being encouraged to voice their opinions at community meetings, parents also have a say in which teachers are hired at their school. The administration sets up a reception to meet final candidates and get parental input, McGarry says.

“It also teaches us because a huge part of a teacher’s life is interacting with parents, and if we’re able to see candidates in that venue, then that’s a great way of finding out,” she says.

Another goal of pulling parents into the process is to convey the idea that parents have a right to expect a good education for their kids, not just at Rocketship, but beyond. They want parents to expect open communication with teachers, high achievement standards at the school. “We want people who are advocating for better education, people who really care about what’s going on,” she says. “That’s the tipping point.”

Read about Rocketship’s hybrid learning program and watch a video about Rocketship student Sintia Marquez.

Flickr:HygieneMatters

Learning Poetry through Bob Dylan and the Beatles

By Sara Bernard

Students, schools, and homeschooling parents are on a perpetual hunt for high-quality, vetted, free (or cheap) educational materials.

Shmoop, a growing collection of study guides and teacher resources on everything from SAT prep to the Civil War, is attempting to fill that need. It’s mostly free of charge, with some nominal fees for test prep and a few other features.

“We’re horrified at how much money is often charged to schools for this kind of thing. We try to make it inexpensive,” said Ellen Siminoff, Shmoop’s president and CEO. And last year, she says, Shmoop offered their test-prep materials for free to ten disadvantaged school districts.

Shmoop isn’t crowdsourced — the company and its authors own the content; it’s not edited by its user community — but the site is still going through a beta phase, with all the requests and recommendations from users. Shmoop is funded primarily through advertising and small licensing fees, and all of the content is produced by PhDs, K-12 teachers, and other subject-area experts.

“The requirement is that it has to be great content and authors have to know the material,” says Siminoff, “but it has to be funny and interesting, too. You can’t just know Ulysses, you have to like Ulysses.”

I asked Siminoff a few questions about the Silicon Valley-based company and how it works. Shmoop’s mantra: If content producers love their subjects, students and teachers will, too.

Q: Why Shmoop? How did it start?

My husband and I were looking at educational resources online for our own kids. We became quite angry at what was on the Web. It was reductive, it talked down to kids. So much was about how to cheat. We wanted to build something that encouraged students to learn. Anyone who loves any subject loves it because their favorite teachers taught it to them — often, those were teachers who loved their subjects, too. We wanted to do that.

The site has been up for a little over two years, although we thought about it a lot before we put it up. We started out by building content related to literature. We wrote everything in a very colloquial tone. Students liked the approach and teachers liked it too, but it was librarians, actually, who were the first to use us.

Q. Who uses Shmoop now?

Mostly students, teachers, and parents. We have a big homeschool parent audience. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to teach a young child, but you often notice that you’ve forgotten what you used to know! We have a whole teacher area with teacher resources, too, that help make teaching the Civil War, civics, Hamlet, and so on, interactive and fun using the Web. We’ve put up some test prep areas, for SAT, AP, and ACT. We now have multiple million users per month. We’ve licensed a lot of material to entire school districts, such as Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.

Q: What kind of content does Shmoop have? How is it growing?

I don’t sleep at night because of all the stuff we have to do! We started out with literature and then we expanded into poetry. I hated poetry until I read Shmoop poetry. I realized I didn’t understand poetry — that was my problem. One of the most fun sections for us was all the stuff we did related to music. One of the things we were talking about was who our favorite poets were, and Bob Dylan came up as one of our favorite poets. So we “Shmooped” All Along the Watchtower. We’ve since done Bruce Springsteen, Eminem, Kanye West, the Beatles. A lot of teachers say, “What a great way to open a poetry unit, to talk about music!”

We’re now expanding into math and science, too. We have Pre-Algebra and are going to put up AP Calculus in a month or so, and are working on a lot more in math and science. It’s feedback that drives us; everyone sends us notes and tells us what we’re missing. That’s why I put “beta” on the site — I never feel we’re done. What’s great about this platform is you never have to wait until the next publishing cycle to add something.

Q: Why do online materials like Shmoop work?

It’s our real belief that learning doesn’t have to be linear. [On Shmoop], you can bounce around, you don’t have to read something straight through. We guide you a little, but part of it is getting great epiphanies about something you didn’t know about. You can be reading Huck Finn and get curious about the Civil War; you can be reading a piece of poetry and wonder who Emily Dickinson really was. That’s the beauty of the Web. And even if we don’t have it on Shmoop, we link to it. We have a “Best of the Web” area, a whole photo area, and link to audio and video and a bunch of other things.