by Head of School Joe Puggelli
During a parent coffee that accompanied her son’s Visit Day last January, the mother of a prospective middle school student said to me, “When I think about my son’s next school, I feel torn between two completely different realities: My son is a little boy, and I want him to enjoy being a little boy, and I want him to be safe and secure and happy. That’s my emotional perspective. There’s also a practical perspective. He will soon become a young man, and he has to be prepared for an increasingly complex and challenging world if he is to remain safe and secure and happy.”
The parent put her finger precisely at the spot where the emotional and the practical meet and create a tension. This same tension is created by the interplay between other pairs of related, legitimate, but different realities, such as the individual and the group; rational analysis and visceral feel; the standard policy and human judgment; and in-the-box thinking and out-of-the-box innovation.
If a person sees the emotional and the practical (or any of the other of what James Baldwin calls the fundamental polarities of Life) as mutual conflicting realities that produce a destructive tension, then this person will favor one or the other as the superior choice. This favoring of A over B, or of B over A, will result in decisions; actions will flow from those decisions; and the actions will have consequences. Inevitably, one or the other reality will be affirmed and one will get short shrift. For example, institutions, no matter what their rhetoric, frequently favor the policy over a person’s judgment; and organizations, no matter what their rhetoric, frequently are better disposed to the group than to the individual.
However, if one sees polarities as complementary realities that generate a robust and creative tension, then one will strive to integrate those polarities and through that integration create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.
At SAAS, we see Baldwin’s polarities as complementary realities, and the decisions, actions, and consequences that flow from our choosing this perspective shape our learning environment. And a school’s learning environment is, according to Robert Kaplan of the Harvard Business School, “the only thing a school can claim as its ‘product.’”
Our Learning Environment
The foundation of Seattle Academy’s “learning environment” is our Culture of Performance, which requires complex thinking, the integration of skills in moments of action, and taking risks, often before an audience.
And we’re also committed to a program that promotes excellence and participation. It is essential to who we are that we allow the very talented to pursue excellence—whether in academics, arts, or athletics—while we also encourage the less experienced to participate, by offering access and opportunities at multiple levels of challenge.
The Seattle Academy Speech & Debate Team, for example, recently won its fourth consecutive state title (the fifth in a decade). Seven students moved on to national-level competition at the Tournament of Champions in Los Angeles, with Ben Symons ‘11 finishing third in Storytelling and Rachel Liddell ‘11 winning the National Championship in Expository Speech.
Several members of the Speech and Debate team had no experience or even interest in the Speech program when they entered SAAS. But the spirit of exploration and participation that they demonstrated in joining the team was not an accident: It was the natural consequence of our “requirement” that kids try a lot of things over time.
The Mission Delivered
I couldn’t help but reflect back on the Visit Day conversation with the parent during my preparation for Seattle Academy’s 2011 graduation ceremony. At graduation, each senior gets their moment in the “Hot Seat,” as each sits, literally and figuratively, in the chair and in the spotlight, as we talk about their journey and their accomplishments at Seattle Academy.
The Days After a Seattle Academy graduation always bring at least several phone calls from those who have just attended their first Seattle Academy graduation. These conversations echo a theme from a call I got several years ago from a parent of a sophomore, who attended because she had heard from several friends, “You won’t truly understand Seattle Academy until you go to a graduation.” The Day After she told me, “I got it before, but now I really get it. What truly impressive young people. They’re impressive because of the variety of the things that they’ve done and because they exude a credibility and a confidence that is worth its weight in gold. Now I understand why you’re so passionate about having a culture that encourages doing things, not just talking about them.”
The Class of 2011 not only compiled a superlative record of college admissions and won a collective six million dollars in merit scholarships; but they also continued the trend of our seniors receiving, as a result of their performances as unpaid interns in our Senior Project Internship Program, multiple offers of paying jobs, most of them for summer work but several for permanent employment post-college from organizations small and large, including Sustainable Fisheries, Boeing, the University of Washington Psychology Lab, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute.
How We Deliver the Mission
One of the distinguishing characteristics of life at Seattle Academy is the high quality of the relationships and the connections between kids and teachers, both in class and outside of class. These strong connections make the transition into Seattle Academy an upbeat and positive experience and also make daily life around here a lot more fun than most kids and faculty have seen anywhere else. And fun is a vastly underrated part of an excellent education.
But as important as fun is, our true purpose behind building these strong relationships and connections is that they create an educational environment in which the kids trust the adults and are therefore willing to do a lot of things; and in the doing of a lot of things comes enormous growth and success.
Teachers and students, of course, function within the context of an educational program, and the four cornerstones of our program being academics, arts, athletics, and outdoor trips/ foreign travel. In each area we maintain a no-cut policy that encourages even the least experienced of students to do that most Seattle Academy of things: to take a risk and try something new.
In some cases the “trying” is voluntary. For example, we don’t force students to sign up for the most challenging outdoor trips or the most challenging Honors classes. In many cases, the “trying” is built into the program. For example, all students will make presentations; all students will engage in group work; all students will take dance. (This requirement once led to a self-described science geek marching into my office to object to the dance class he was “being forced to take.” He protested, “I’m going to be a scientist and scientists are rational people. We don’t need to know how to dance.”)
Over time, the Seattle Academy learning environment produces two huge concrete benefits. First, the environment enlarges the individual student’s “Basket of Talents” beyond just the talents he or she was born with. “Talents Born” are the things students are good at when they walk in the door (such as the verbal talent that helped Rachel Liddell ‘11 win her National Championship in Expository Speech).
The basket we’re aiming for also includes “Talents Made,” the things that students become good at because of repeated practice with good teachers and coaches (such as the presentation skills that Andrew Ferguson ‘04 calls the “the key to my professional success” as a Boeing engineer).
But the Seattle Academy basket goes further, to include “Talents Discovered,” my favorite category, which I define as “things that you would never have known you were good at unless you had had to try things you really wouldn’t have tried if it had been up to you.” An example of this type of Talent is the interest in research science that Cody Finke ‘08 discovered at Seattle Academy, which led to his Senior Project at the Seattle Lifelong AIDS Alliance, which led to his college chemistry major at Carleton College, which led to his selection as a Barry M. Goldwater Scholar, the most prestigious award in the U.S. conferred on undergraduates studying science.
The second enormous concrete benefit that the Seattle Academy learning environment offers is that young people learn what we call “Plan B Skills,” or knowing how to operate effectively when Plan A doesn’t work.
Plan A is the metaphorical road map someone gives you when they send you to solve a problem. If Plan A is a good one and you are good at following a road map and the problem has an obvious solution, then you will find the answer. Of course, so will all the rest of the good Plan A thinkers.
Bill Burnett is a professor of mechanical engineering and the Executive Director of the Product Design Program at Stanford University, where they admit the Best and the Brightest of the Plan A thinkers. Interestingly, Burnett says that many Stanford students are neither well prepared to succeed in his program, nor would they be prepared to enter the work force.
Burnett says that the first thing he has to do with the classes of 4.0, 2400-SAT young people who enter his prestigious design program is get them to focus on something beyond the grade; the second is to teach them how to think. Burnett’s analysis is that most students have learned a lot of content and learned how to find someone else’s “right answer,” but they are completely unaccustomed to using information to solve real-world problems; and they are lost without a clue when it comes to solving problems for which there is no obvious “right” answer.
Here’s an example of Plan B skills. Graduating seniors Dorothy “Dot” White ‘11 and Daniel Stewart ‘11 both did their senior projects (a six-week capstone experience which involves a senior working as an intern in an area business or non-profit) at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (aka “the Hutch”). They were given a job that no one at the Hutch had the time to do, one that several years ago had frustrated the programming professionals to whom the task had been outsourced: create a useable database to search through hundreds of pathology reports.
The programmers to whom the job had initially been given were successful “in-the-box” thinkers; but they failed to solve this out-of-the-box, Gordian Knot of a problem of creating a practical tool out of the mess of a gazillion pathology reports written by many doctors with different communications skills and different writing styles; who made both significantly and subtly different language choices; and who used different protocols for templates and formats.
As veterans of many Plan B moments during their time at Seattle Academy, Dot and Daniel were not overwhelmed by, and were therefore comfortable with, being lost in the wilderness with no compass. In fact, from grade 6 through grade 12 the Seattle Academy learning environment teaches students to overcome a major barrier to good Plan B skills: The fear that one can’t handle failure or the unknown. As an American Studies student once said to me when I asked if he was overwhelmed by the Impossible Task we had assigned his group to wrestle with in the Civil Disobedience Project, “I’m confused and lost, but the fifteenth time you’re confused is not as scary as the first time, so I’m a little less lost.”
Dot and Daniel’s experiences at Seattle Academy had also enhanced a Talent that is at the core of Plan B Skills and that is fundamental to effective critical thinking skills: the Talent of pattern recognition, of being able to see patterns in the things you’re observing or working on, sort through the patterns that you see, recognize the pattern you must focus on to move things forward, and then choose from your “tool chest” the skill(s) that you must apply in order to get the job done.
According to the New York Times, brain research supports the existence of this Talent: “Recent research has found that true experts have something at least as valuable as a mastery of the rules; gut instinct, an instantaneous grasp of the type of problem they’re up against…. Now a small group of cognitive scientists is arguing that schools and students could take far more advantage of this same bottom-up ability, called perceptual learning. The brain is a pattern-recognition machine and, when focused properly, it can quickly deepen a person’s grasp of a principle…. Better yet, perceptual knowledge builds automatically: There’s no reason someone with a good eye for fashion or wordplay cannot develop an intuition for classifying rocks or mammals or algebraic equations, given a little interest or motivation.”
To us, it’s not an accident that Dot and Daniel defy stereotype: Both are highly accomplished artists, and both are really fine students. But in addition to their sophisticated artistic and academic skills, they have an intuitive “feel” for problem-solving. And they got their intuition the Old Fashioned Way: They earned it, doing “unrelated” things like bagpiping, dancing, being curious about science, competing in cross country, singing, playing the violin, and writing.
So when they arrived at the Hutch and found themselves in a metaphorical Strange Land without a compass, Dot and Daniel had been there before: They knew that the sun still rose in the east and set in the west, and that moss still grew on the north side of trees. In this case, as Daniel put it, “We’ve learned at Seattle Academy that some problems you can solve by figuring out the Big Picture and then the details work themselves out; some problems you work out some of the details and then see the Big Picture. We tried both approaches. The second one worked.”
It didn’t hurt that years of experience at doing a lot of stuff with skilled teachers had taught Dot and Daniel to work efficiently. Their supervisor said, “They worked so quickly that our problem was keeping up with them and giving them the next thing to do”; and it didn’t hurt that the two had picked up relevant, practical skills at Seattle Academy, including, their supervisor noted, their facility with language and skill at data analysis.
Nor did it hurt that Daniel and Dot are two really smart young people. But both of them say that being used to the hurly burly, rough-and-tumble learning environment of Seattle Academy made them well prepared for the hurly burly, rough-and-tumble “real world” of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and for a “wicked” problem that had no solution, but which they solved.
The alignment between the way we structure the Seattle Academy learning environment and the requirements for success in college and in Life is intentional. We believe that the best education must include a top-to-bottom consistently strong alignment between what we teach, what students learn, and what students will require as they go on to their lives beyond school. We need to make sure that our good curricular intentions get expressed in effective teaching, leading to learning that brings value to students.
David Brooks recently wrote in the New York Times about what he sees as a misalignment between experiences in school and the requirements of life after school: “This year’s [college] graduates are members of the most supervised generation in American history. [They] have been monitored, tutored, coached, and honed to an unprecedented degree. Yet they will enter a world that is unprecedentedly wide open and unstructured….[They] are raised in an environment that demands one set of navigational skills, and they are then cast out into a different environment requiring a different set of skills, which they have to figure out on their own.”
Or, as the Dean of the Stanford Law School, Larry Kramer, said recently in explaining why Stanford is joining the national movement to create a greater alignment between the curricula of law schools and the actual practicing of law: “Law firms are saying, ‘You’re sending us people who are not in a position to do anything useful for clients.’ This is a first effort to try and fix that.”
We believe that the misalignment between what young people learn and what is required for success in college and in Life helps explain how that parent at the coffee nailed it when she worried about the world her son would inherit; a world in which, in inflation-adjusted dollars, the 1973 median annual income for men 25 and over was $42,288 and the 2009 median income for men 25 and over was $36,801 (Source: Education Weekly, “Economic Change Effects on Men,” Tom Mortenson, May 2011); a world in which, according to both Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce and Massachusetts Insitute of Technology’s Hamilton Project, structural changes in employment patterns will make it increasingly difficult for young people to thrive if your competitive edge is that you know a lot of information, that you do something cheaply, or that you’re really good at solving Plan A problems; a world in which exist the truly discordant realities that, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 37% of the “millennial” generation born between 1980 and 2000 are unemployed or underemployed; and yet, according to Dr. David King of SUNY Oswego, who is responsible for aligning the curricula in the SUNY system’s graduate programs with the Real World, “There are several million job vacancies in the country right now, but they don’t line up with graduates’ skills.”
For us, the Culture of Performance helps create and maintain the critical alignment between the learning environment and Life. The truth is that the Culture of Performance is an effective training mechanism because it replicates Life. From Grade 6 through Grade 12, our young people can’t just sit in class and memorize information: They have to do work, especially project-based work and problem-based work, that requires them to use different skills in a moment of action, frequently before an audience that will judge them not by their standardized test scores, nor by how charming they are, but by their actions under the pressure of scrutiny. They learn the acceptance of failure as part of the process of success; the use of all capacities, including the rational, the emotional, the creative, and the intuitive; and the absolute necessity of assessing the audience and adjusting one’s plan based on the reality of the audience.
The Culture of Performance, putting knowledge into action and turning action into knowledge, forces the development of a range of 21st-century skills, among which our graduates list the following five as most important:
- High-quality written and oral skills
- The skill of being creative and productive with technology
- The skill of knowing how to adapt to a new environment
- The skill of knowing how to perform well, both as an individual and as a member of a team
- The skill of knowing how to assess a problem and how to find a solution that adds value
Alumni Living the Mission
Liz Sewell, a 2002 graduate of Seattle Academy, recently wrote: “Since graduating from college in 2006, I have taken advantage of the most important skill that I took away from Seattle Academy, the skill of being comfortable in my own skin and comfortable in the company and in the cultures of others. I have worked in the non-profit world in Thailand and India, where I worked with the Rural Development Foundation, whose mission it is to provide quality education to rural children, and I will soon be off to Colombia to work with a group that aims to bring educational opportunities to refugee families living in the hillside slums of Medellín.”
When Sarah Robinson ‘09 was a Seattle Academy senior, she participated in the same Senior Project program as Dot and Daniel. Sarah did her project at Boeing, working in the Systems Management Department that produces, tests, and runs simulation models of strategic business plans.
Her project supervisor was impressed that Sarah was familiar with the STELLA computer modeling program—having used it in her junior biology class to model predator-prey systems—noting that most high school students would not be familiar with it, much less experienced in its application.
Because she was familiar with the modeling program, the folks at Boeing thought that Sarah could work with their version, called VENSIM, which Sarah described to her Seattle Academy project advisor as “the not-so-good-looking-but-brighter-and-more-capable cousin of STELLA.”
When working with Boeing’s manpower supply program, Sarah added a tweak that dramatically improved its utility and so impressed her supervisor that he arranged for her to make a presentation to Top Brass at Boeing.
At the conclusion of the presentation, the senior Boeing executive said, “Young lady, you have a job here any time you want it. Just show up.” About to enter her junior year at Claremont McKenna College, Sarah telecommutes to Boeing as a Level One Engineer.
Why We Deliver the Mission
My immigrant grandfather used to say, “The world can change as much as it wants. Up can become Down, and Down can become Up. But the eternal truths have never changed and will never change.” To us, it is an eternal truth that there will always be a place for people who add value to the lives of others and who in so doing to enrich their own lives. That’s why we do what we do.
This article was originally published in the 2011-2012 issue of Best of SAAS, Seattle Academy’s annual magazine.
