What if schools built storytelling and writing into every aspect of learning? What if students saw their schooling as a journey, as challenging and demanding as the adventures found in The Odyssey or Moby Dick or Mountains On Mountains? What if students explored their subjects like great mysteries, using all their gifts as investigators and analysts to understand the inner logic of their subjects and their selves?
What if going to school offered a narrative experience—in which the students/heroes took responsibility for their destinies?
Nobody grasps anything as quickly or well as a good story. Our lives are stories. Evolution hardwired us to love and understand stories. Even if we don’t know a particular story, we recognize the basic form of all stories. Robert Graves famously remarked that there is only one basic plot—the desire to return home, to a state of innocence, found in the story of the Garden of Eden. So we eagerly gobble up the details of any decent tale. Once you put something into narrative form, you can hang a lot of other stuff on it.
Even the simplest stories, like fairy tales, inspire us think expansively about matters of life and death, relationships, longing, failure, and all the other dimensions of life. “There is no psychology in a fairy tale,” notes Philip Pullman, the British author of fantasy novels. “The characters have no interior life. . . . One might almost say that the characters in a fairy tale are not actually conscious.” With the characters lacking depth, the readers project their own lives — and fears and fantasies — onto them.
Remember the scrawny Christmas tree that the round-headed kid brought home in “A Charlie Brown Christmas”?
Remember how the gang decorated it so well that it shimmered?
That’s how stories work. Even a scrawny story (like a fairy tale) can help us to explore a wide range of ideas.
You would think, then, that all schools would want to inspire their students to create their own narratives–something they care about passionately–and then hang more and more ideas onto that narrative.
The Founder
Meet Dennis Littky.
Littky is the founder of the Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center, a school started in 1996 in Providence, R.I., to provide education “one student at a time.” The Met is now part of a nationwide network of schools run by Big Picture Learning, which includes 69 schools in 17 states and the District of Columbia—and 59 schools in Israel, Australia, the Netherlands, and Canada—educating more than 10,000 students worldwide.
Those schools don’t advertise themselves as places of “narrative learning.” But at the heart of their enterprise, everyone understands that learning is a unique journey for each student. It’s a story, as compelling as the old Greek dramas and anything now playing at the Cineplex.
In Big Picture schools, students take no classes, have no teachers, and sit for no tests. Instead, they spend all four years of high school with an “advisory,” a group of 12 to 15 students that meets weekly with a teacher/advisor. Before they graduate, they get to know this group better than any other group anywhere.
Start by Finding Passion
Met students start their high school career by finding their “passion”–some subject that they want to explore for four years in their school activities and internships.
Many students struggle with this challenge — and the opportunity and responsibility it represents — for months. Sometimes they get angry and surly. Or they feel stupid and empty. They act out, look for easy answers. Many consider dropping out to return to the regimented programs of other public schools.
But at some point — usually in December or January of their freshman year, sometimes earlier and sometimes later — students figure out what they want to study. They begin to develop good work habits. They begin to commit to the full responsibilities of their school community.
The Weekly Routine
The Met does not offer a standard curriculum. Students are not required to master survey material for history, literature, math, science. They are not required to take classes. They have to figure out what activities will help them to learn about their passion. The read, interview, take part in existing groups, and start their own groups. Some take a class, here and there, online or at a local college. They also develop projects–organizing plays, trips, gallery shows, and even businesses. They learn by doing.
On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, students go to school, where they read and write, conduct experiments, gather and organize information, and explore their passions. They also take part in schoolwide activities like assemblies and reading groups. Some take classes at nearby schools or organize their own study or work groups.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays, students work as interns with local professionals—business people and farmers, botanists and carpenters, artists and musicians, scientists and computer programmers, judges and doctors.
Even though the Met does not have classes, tests, or grades, it sets parameters for learning along five dimensions—empirical reasoning, symbolic or quantitative reasoning, communications, and social reasoning, and personal qualities. Students build these academic and life skills into all of their activities. Every quarter, students make presentations to the whole school. They must write a 75-page autobiography in their senior year.
The Standard American School
The Big Picture Learning represents a tiny part of the educational system. And most educators resist its approach. But the Big Picture offers a powerful model for overcoming the limits of traditional schools.
For more than a century, American schools have operated on a common idea: That education is a mass good to be delivered from the top down. Schools work like a company or government agency, delivering basic goods to customers in exchange for the dollars that their attendance brings the school. Using a set curriculum, with a standard set of subjects, teachers provide instruction to groups of students ranging from 15 to 30 or more. The students show mastery by performing well on tests, papers, and presentations.
Schools do vary the curriculum—offering different tracks for students, providing a mix of core and optional courses, and even allowing students to take part in some out-of-school programs—but the whole student body is expected to master the same kind of mix of materials.
I understand that lots of schools do a good job educating and guiding lots of their students. Inspired teachers, exciting books, high standards, great clubs and sports programs launch, and deep friendships launch countless productive and happy lives. If the system is broken, it’s not completely broken. Lots of parts still work well.
But all too often, vast swaths of students get lost in school. For this group—and even many of the more successful students—the Big Picture schools offer a powerful alternative.
Littky’s Model
Rather than thinking of the school as a delivery system, Littky sees the school as a place where students come to design their own education. Littky’s schools give students the same kind of individualized attention that a personal tutor would offer.
The results have been positive. Met schools have a graduation rate of 92 percent—for a demographic that usually graduates just more than half of its students—and most graduating seniors have been accepted into colleges. Met graduates have gone on to attend Brown, Penn, Holy Cross, Providence College, and other first-rate schools. Of the Met graduates in college, more than 70 percent are the first in their family to ever attend college.
Dennis Littky, of course, is not the only person involved in this success. Littky’s business partner is a thoughtful and creative man named Elliott Warshaw. He spends the better part of his time on the road, helping to set up and oversee schools and negotiating with school systems for the opportunity to set up a Big Picture school. He’s dreaming big—taking over a whole school system. Besides Littky and Warshaw, there are hundreds of smart and dedicated advisors who guide the students.
Ironically, the greatest challenge of school reform is scaling up. At charter schools and elite private schools, teachers work long, hard hours to track their students and oversee their demanding work loads. Students shuffle in and out of classes, making it hard for teachers to know students well. Many teachers have to get to know more than 100 students a year.
The whole process revolves around advisories of 12 to 15 students. Advisors know their students better than anyone in the world. They know their backgrounds, interests, and abilities; they know their neighborhoods, families, and everyday struggles. This intimate knowledge gives them the insights–and the caring–to help guide them to explore their passions.
If any model can be replicated, it’s this one. The advisors are extraordinary people, but so are countless other teachers. The difference is that they get manageable workloads and exciting, nonrepetitive work. However intensive the work, it does not involve as many “moving parts” as other reform models.
Some Big Picture schools struggle to meet the demands of standardized tests, the lingua franca of college admissions processes and school assessment. Reluctantly, Littky gives the OK for some Big Picture schools to bend the learning model to make sure students are prepared for the “real world” challenges of tests and admissions.
‘But what about…’
When learning about the Big Picture schools, most open-minded people are intrigued but concerned. Don’t we need a standard curriculum? Shouldn’t all students read Shakespeare, study American history, get a strong grounding in algebra and the basic sciences? I myself embrace the idea of a strong core curriculum. E.D. Hirsch’s idea of “cultural literacy” is essential to any possibility for a humane community. We need something to ground ourselves, right?
But Littky points out that most high school graduates — not just in the Facebook Generation, but in all previous generations — never really attained this ideal. And only a portion of students — a third? a quarter? a tenth? — ever develop the broad liberal-arts mastery evoked in policy debates. For the rest, school too often seems irrelevant. They get turned off to learning by the fill-’em-up mentality of most schools.
For the majority that doesn’t thrive under the back-to-basics, liberal-arts ideal, doesn’t it make sense to challenge students to find and pursue their passions? If done well, these students will explore a wide range of subjects just to understand their passion. A student interested in studying the Iraq War — and many other topics — will learn geography, history, economics, warfare, literature, the environment, statistics, music, art, and more. Guided well, most passions could lead to a broad education.
And, most important, students will develop a love of learning — and an ability to teach themselves how to learn over a lifetime.
School as Narrative
Since first learning about the Met and Big Picture Schools, I have tried to understand how it works. I have visited three or four times, spent hours talking with Littky, advisors, and students. I recently conducted a writing workshop at the Met.
I have always been impressed at how the students’ manners, energy, organization, and articulate speech. And the work ethic! They work hard, often long past the usual hours of 9 to 5. Of course, you could also find polite and energetic students at lots of schools. I just visited three terrific classes at Briarcliff High School, in Westchester County, New York, that fit that description.
So what sets Dennis Littky’s schools apart—I mean, besides giving kids both opportunity and responsibility?
I think it’s that the Met and other Big Picture schools make every students time at school part of a great narrative.
Evolutionary biologists tell us that, more than anything else, storytelling sets humans apart from other animals. Other animals need food and shelter to survive. All need to reproduce. Many use some form of language to communicate. But only humans tell stories. As the human species grew beyond small settlements, as we developed bigger brains and had to keep track of far-flung activities, we started telling stories.
Stories gave us a way to make sense of the world—to understand the dangers of nature, to set rules for families and tribes, to create new systems of hunting and cooking and building, to create stores of memory and knowledge. Over the ages, storytelling gave us ways to engage each other.
As I ruminated on these matters, I started to wonder why schools do not incorporate more narrative into their curricula. Wouldn’t biology be more interesting if told as a story? Physics and chemistry? Math? Health? Economics? Social studies?
Sure, students need to learn raw knowledge. Students need to learn anatomy and periodic tables, expository writing and grammar, geography and timelines, statistics and the scientific method. I understand that. But can’t school help students accumulate this knowledge as part of a larger quest that make them whole people—that make them part of a larger drama that excites and amazes them?
The Hero’s Journey
Then I realized that that’s just what Dennis Littky’s schools do. Students need to find something that sparks their interest and then become the hero in the greatest adventure of all. They must figure out how to give form to information.
Every year, every student at The Big Picture schools enacts powerful dramas. The hero of each drama is a student trying to find her purpose and capacities. The drama involves advisors and peers. It involves employers. It involves parents and siblings and old friends, not all benign influences.
The hero needs to figure it out. Like the heroes of other dramas, the journey not only reveals countless “practical” truths along the way, but also a larger meaning and purpose. And to make sure the experience becomes a permanent part of history, the student documents the drama with a memoir at the end of the whole process.
Be skeptical. You should be. But also be open to the idea that real education requires a journey of discovery. Any curious, reasonably intelligent person can master facts and skills. But all of us really need—and what we owe young people—a chance to play the lead role in our own dramas.
