NESSC High School Redesign in Action Conference

In this session, you will learn how Winnacunnet High School (WHS) is liberating learning through the implementation of Extended Learning Opportunities (ELO). ELOs are learning experiences that break free of the traditional school structure and allow students to participate in personalized learning experiences that are authentic demonstrations of learning through school and community contexts.

This session will describe WHS’s ELO Program structure and implementation, including establishing an ELO Committee, developing a professional development and information system for school personnel, risk mitigation, teacher compensation, and the process of setting up the rigorous, valid, and authentic components of an individual ELO experience.

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The Writing Center at Foxcroft Academy is a student-driven program where students can seek the support and guidance of their peers during all stages of the writing process. Students are not line-editors or tutors, but rather coaches who assist their peers by focusing on the writing process, not the final grade. During its inaugural year, the Writing Center aims to improve the academic culture at Foxcroft Academy.

In this session, students will discuss the training course they took to prepare for coaching other students, as well as the work they do with their peers. Faculty advisors will explain how the Writing Center came to be. Presenters also will share feedback and data they have gathered about the center, how they have promoted it, and the overall reception it has had in its first few months.

While this presentation will share the story of the Foxcroft Academy Writing Center, participants will leave with ideas as to how they might plan and construct similar programs for their own schools, and how to measure the impact of such programs.

For the past two years, the Foxcroft Academy community has worked to develop a digital student portfolio system to enable a proficiency-based and personalized assessment of Maine’s Guiding Principles, which the school has adopted as its mission standards.

In this session, members of the administration and the leadership team will present the current status of their work with digital student portfolios. More importantly, they will share and reflect on the professional development structures and processes that have guided their efforts. Presenters will focus on how they’ve used design thinking and the professional learning community model to engage with this work in a way that will develop knowledge and skills that teachers can transfer to their subject-area work in proficiency-based and personalized learning.

Participants will engage with a variety of essential questions that have emerged from Foxcroft Academy’s work so that they will leave with ideas on how to develop, sustain, or improve cross-cutting standards assessment in a way that will drive systemic improvement in proficiency-based and personalized learning initiatives.

This student-led presentation will provide participants with a unique student perspective on what it is like to learn in a personalized-learning high school. Students will describe how their educational experience at Three Rivers Middle College (TRMC) has allowed them to be highly successful in college courses while still in high school.
Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg, authors of How Google Works, define a smart creative as “a hardworking person who will question the status quo and attack things differently.” Students will discuss how developing habits and practices that support a growth mindset, delayed gratification, grit, and restorative practices empowers students to become “smart creatives” and prepare for life and work in an ever-changing world.

This student-led presentation will provide participants with a unique student perspective on what it is like to learn in a personalized-learning high school. Students will describe how their educational experience at Three Rivers Middle College (TRMC) has allowed them to be highly successful in college courses while still in high school.
Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg, authors of How Google Works, define a smart creative as “a hardworking person who will question the status quo and attack things differently.” Students will discuss how developing habits and practices that support a growth mindset, delayed gratification, grit, and restorative practices empowers students to become “smart creatives” and prepare for life and work in an ever-changing world.