Many people look at education with a nostalgic eye. This vision has us looking back to the good old days when the world was perfect. All people were good looking and all children were above average. Of course, the reality of this past differs greatly from the idyllic vision. High schools were not perfect places. At least mine was not. Students fought, smoked, drank, and instigated a great deal of overall mischief. Perhaps most damning about my old high school was how boring it often was. I remember more than a few lectures where I was counting the number of ceiling tiles and dreaming about the events of the upcoming weekend.

If high schools today resemble those of 30 years ago, we are in trouble. Why? Students of today are far different than those decades ago and have very different needs. For example, the poverty rate is far higher than in prior decades. The free and reduced lunch count (a key poverty indicator) in the Columbus schools has gone from 24 percent in 1995 to 37 percent in 2005. During the same time, the minority population increased from six to 25 percent. If we could go back 20 or more years, the differences would even be greater.

Perhaps having even more impact, students today are born and raised in the age of the technological explosion. This daily changing technology makes their lives more hands-on, fast-paced and interactive than ever before. Likewise, the change in technology has caused a knowledge explosion. The rate of information that is produced today is mind boggling. No longer can we hope that students will be able to remember all the important information available.

Because of these changes, schools must look and be different than 25 years ago. Columbus High School recognizes this dramatic need for change. As a result, they are moving to a block schedule in the 2007-08. In preparation for this change, they are training teachers in methods to make classes more interactive, team-oriented, and focused on priority classroom content. They are also working hard to build other key success features into their operation such as those below.

Schools of today must be places where students take more ownership of their own learning and where a partnership with the teacher is developed and maintained. In such classrooms, teachers become facilitators of learning as compared to being resident experts on every topic. Effective classrooms of today have refocused their instruction on helping students access the information they need when they need it versus simply having them memorize facts in order to regurgitate them back on a test. Key information is still memorized, but a new focus on teaching the methods of information access has been added.

Today’s successful schools are active environments where students are not only allowed to move, but are encouraged to do so. Movement and interaction are important ways to use the body and innate social interests to enhance the learning. Likewise students’ interests drive instruction in high performing classrooms. Without including students’ interests, classroom instruction becomes a bitter medicine that must be forced down. Adding students’ interests to a classroom is like that “spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down” to coin a phrase from The Sound of Music.

“ Sit and get” classrooms are antiquated. Passive learning environments where students compliantly sit and day dream should be artifacts in museums and not examples of today’s schools. I doubt that such schools have ever truly been effective.

Because of these realities, the Columbus High School teachers are on a mission of learning, discovery, and change. Through the training experiences planned by the administration and staff, the high school is being transformed into a learning community that will promote student active participation, interest, and discovery.

This new learning environment coincides with the change in the physical environment that was made possible by the generous investment of our community. It will be exciting to watch this new high school learning environment blossom and create learning excitement in our youth.

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