Washington Leadership Academy (WLA) is an open-enrollment public charter high school in Washington, D.C. Angela Duffy, Springpoint’s communications director, visited the school earlier this year. This post includes some of her reflections on the visit. For more ideas about innovative schools to visit, check out Springpoint’s newest Schools to Visit in 2019 guide.
On a snowy winter morning, the staff of Washington Leadership Academy gathered for a short morning meeting, which ended with all adults saying in unison, “our kids” as a way to ground them in their shared goal and purpose. This focus on the importance and value of each student is apparent throughout the school model, starting with its mission to prepare scholars with the knowledge, skills, and habits required for success in college and lives of public leadership.
Launched in 2016 with 110 ninth graders, the school combines a focus on strong academics, social-emotional learning, and virtual reality (VR). An XQ Super School, they plan to use a portion of their prize money to hire developers who will bring their VR vision to life across disciplines. For example, the school is designing a module to study the Vietnam War through three experiences: the lens of a reporter interviewing eyewitnesses, a virtual timeline, and photojournalism. Students will eventually be able to visit a virtual chemistry lab that provides hands-on access to chemistry experiences while going beyond what’s possible in a physical lab (e.g., a VR tour of a molecule).
These capabilities will compound the current choices students have in the classes they take and the latitude they have to select what projects they work on across disciplines. VR also holds the promise of introducing students to professionals from around the globe, weaving them into the school’s orbit of external partners that the school intentionally cultivates.
A VR look at Saigon during the Vietnam War
The school’s academic vision is student-centered and ambitious, aiming to provide students with rigorous personalized learning, access to college prep academic coursework, meaningful projects and experiential learning, and a comprehensive computer science education. The vision is underscored by a focus on social justice issues and a social-emotional curriculum.
“During our planning and design of the school, we spent significant time thinking through two questions: What do we want to graduate profile to be of a WLA student? And how will we define and execute on an academic vision that fits that profile?,” said Joseph Webb, the founding principal and current Chief Academic Officer at WLA. “We took a firm stance on what personalized learning is to us and decided that we couldn’t yield on the college-level content our kids need to interface with. We didn’t change the standard, we just changed the pathway kids are taking to get there.”
He continued: “We also believe that the growing emphasis nationally on project learning is spot on. Kids need to be engaging in content that reflects the college and working world—like group and research projects. We were also intentional in defining what we mean when we say ‘real-world application.’ The design principle that was most obvious to us during our research was the need for a Computer Science program that was a core academic requirement for our kids. We know that students will need a fundamental and deep understanding of computing to have access to both the 21st-century forms of voice and the 21st-century workforce.”
WLA’s computer science focus means that students take a computer science class each of their four years at WLA and all sophomores take the AP computer science course and test. WLA students account for over a third of all the students in D.C. who pass the AP test and over half of all girls and 68% of all students of color in the city. The District of Columbia leads the nation in female participation on the AP Computer Science Principles exam at 47% (in front of New York at 40%) in large part because of WLA students who account for 58% of all the girls in D.C. who sat for the exam. According to WLA, this focus was chosen because “the rapid change in tech skills requires new tech people to learn and adapt to new programming languages—many of which require a foundational knowledge in some of the more basic languages learned in college CS courses,” according to the school. Not only did WLA’s school design team understand that computer science will become increasingly necessary for the future workforce and for the future of communication, but they realized the inherent value of imparting the kind of analytical skills and content knowledge that a four-year computer science scope and sequence would require.
Each element of the academic vision also helps ensure that students gain skills like collaboration, creative and analytical thinking, and the ability to craft strong arguments. Meaningful projects and experiential learning are a key mechanism through which learning at WLA is connected to the type of learning students that will experience in college and, ultimately what will be expected of them in the working world. For example, in a recent Computational Art, students created personally meaningful designs that they showcased on a product of their choosing. One student applied her design to a pair of sneakers. Leaders at WLA had a prototype of the shoe made with the student’s design and presented the shoes to her on her birthday.
Access to college-level courses both prepares students for college and gives them access to a wide swath of college options. It is also a way for students to build and explore a range of skills and interests and for teachers to personalize learning to deeply engage students.
“At WLA my teachers are always relaying back to us how things are going to be in college,” says Hannah Lee, a student at WLA. “Ms. Hartzell, my English teacher…says ‘if you’re going to say something or write something in an English class, you need to be able to use evidence to support your statements.’ My AP Computer Science task requires me to do a project that will look like a project in college. I know that because it’s an AP course but also because my teacher reminds me all the time.”
WLA has an intentional approach to cultivating school culture—from a whole school perspective, down to their goal of every student having at least two adults that they see as “anchors.” In between, the school has purposefully crafted grade-level, “Houses”, and advisory, which includes space and time for circles and one-on-one check-ins. Other staples of their intentional culture include consistently held expectations, celebration of academics, an emphasis on personal growth for students, a proactive approach to preventing conflict, restorative practices for conflict management, and trauma-informed teaching and de-escalation strategies.
Another mechanism through which WLA has focused on rigorous academics is by partnering with CommonLit, an organization that offers free, online reading programs that include high-quality, research-based curriculum as well as data tracking tools and interim and formative assessments. WLA sees the partnership as part of their firm belief that students should be able to learn at their own level and at their own pace to build toward mastery.
WLA is the organization’s first lab school, which means that a CommonLit coach works closely with four of the school’s reading teachers in grades 9 and 10 who are implementing their curriculum tools and formative assessments. Observing their instructional materials in action has allowed the CommonLit team to make very rapid iterations.
Michelle Brown, the founder and CEO of CommonLit, has seen the effectiveness of rapid iteration on practice in real time as well as a way to hone the curriculum over time. “Recently I was in a classroom observing a lesson where students were not referring back to the text. The CommonLit team met quickly and devised a subsequent lesson where students would need to dig into the evidence. We were able to immediately see if and how that change made a difference in how students interacted with the text.” The ability to make fast changes that respond to student needs and assessment data, as well as coaching for teachers aligned to curriculum, are key ways that CommonLit and WLA ensure that ELA curriculum and the instructional model are deeply intertwined.
WLA focuses on scaffolding learning experiences, something that CommonLit is laser-focused on as well. Recently, students in 9th grade were learning about the reality of North Korea by reading a literary text smuggled out of that country. The dense literary text incorporated demanding vocabulary and cultural references, which prompted ELA teachers to build up students’ vocabulary and background knowledge to allow them to access this rich text—and to understand the value in doing so. CommonLit and WLA have also joined forces to help teachers increase the intellectual rigor required of students during lessons. This means that teachers do less of the heavy lifting—with regard to posing and answering questions and driving discussions—so that students engage deeply throughout class time. WLA teachers approach this from many angles while CommonLit is providing support via curricular materials that can nudge teachers in this direction.
WLA is continuing to iterate on their school model as they scale the school to serve grades 9 – 12. If you’re interested in learning more about WLA, take a look at this XQ profile, their feature in The 74, or their open-source resource library.