What is Building Futures?

In planning out my first handful of Blog posts, this one was originally at the end of the 4 or 5 ideas I had loosely jotted down as topics to write about.  I didn’t initially feel that talking about my own class and my teaching assignment would be necessary when examining some very broad topics in education to start of this Blog series.  Start big, and slowly work toward the details I figured. 

But as I started to write those other pieces, it quickly became apparent that trying to explain why I have a particular view without the context of what I do serving as a backdrop would be occasionally challenging.  So this post is getting an early call-up while the others hang out in the green room a bit longer.  To be fair, I also think that there may be some inherent narcissism at play.

What Is Building Futures?

A quick glance at my About the Author box will tell you that I teach high school science and math and that the class I teach is a little different.  But that five-sentence blurb does nothing to convey how different my classroom is.

Each year we take a group of Grade 10 students from across two or three different high schools, and for 4 of their 5 school days every week they show up at a garage behind a showhome in a residential housing development instead of to their schools.  The garage itself is actually a one-room schoolhouse.  There are lockers along one wall, whiteboards and a projector screen opposite them, and tables and chairs throughout the space.  Rolling shelves store school supplies, a metal lab cart houses a coffee maker, a kettle, and a microwave.  A wireless router tucked in a windowsill provides a blinking LED symphony of data for kids who are all expected to have their own laptops or tablets in tow each day (for those who can’t manage the cost of a device, their school arranges a loaner).

Directly across the alley from the garage are two single-family homes that will start as little more than empty lots in September, and by May will be fully constructed houses ready to be sold as spec homes by a small, local residential builder.  During the course of the construction our intrepid group of 14 to 16 year olds will spend half days in groups of 2 to 4 on these work sites learning how the various components of these houses get assembled to make a finished, livable home.  Part of that learning includes hands-on assembly of those components.  Students will frame walls, hang doors, pull wire, cut drain pipes, screw on drywall, install hardwood, mortar stonework, lay tile, and paint walls.  By the end of their school year, they’ll be able to say they helped to build two houses all the way from hole-in-the-ground to keys-in-the-hand.

So where do I fit in to all of this?  Firstly, I’m responsible for supervising while our students work alongside the tradespeople building the houses.  It’s essentially a year-long field trip, and as with any field trip, supervision is a necessity.  This is especially true when the field trip includes circular saws and compressed air nailers.  However, students are only ever on the jobsite in small groups, as they take turns throughout the week working on the homes.  The rest of the class is typically back in our one-room school garage.  There, I work alongside a humanities teacher to make sure that the rest of their grade 10 curricula get covered over the course of the school year.  One day a week is spent back at one of the schools in a regular classroom.  Science labs, physical education, and anything else that doesn’t work well in a garage gets handled on those days.

On first examination, it already seems pretty progressive – hands-on learning, real-life relevance, and an immersive environment.  But those pieces are really only the tip of the iceberg that makes the Building Futures program special.  Here are some other non-trivial differences as compared to a “normal” grade 10 experience:

·      We teachers are with the same class of 30ish kids all year.  5 days a week, 10 months in a row.  That’s a pretty big departure from my previous life in a regular school setting, where I would often see over 100 kids in a day, some for no more than 9 weeks in a term before getting new sets of faces.  It’s not uncommon to encounter high school teachers in our jurisdiction who interact formally with 150 or more different students over the course of a single school year.

·      There are no bells and no scheduling blocks.  Some days Math happens in the morning, others in the afternoon.  Some days we don’t do Math at all.

·      We have a full year to cover all our curricular objectives, not just a semester.

·      The program accepts all levels of student academically.  On first blush, it sounds like the kind of schooling one would only put a vocational student into, one eventually bound to work in the industry the program is aligned with.  In fact, we get all kinds of kids applying – some who just want a different school experience and some looking for some practical life experience whether they’re interested in the trades or not.  Some kids hear that the teaching and learning looks a lot different that what they’re used to, and they’re attracted to the program for that reason alone.

·      The diverse group necessitates that we teach a variety of levels of course material simultaneously.  I deliver an academic science course (Science 10 for you readers familiar with the Alberta system) and a vocational course (Science 14).  The same is true for Math (10C, 10-3, and 10-4), English (10-1 and 10-2), and Social Studies (10-1 and 10-2).  This demands both creativity and flexibility in terms of the ways that lessons, assessments, and projects must be delivered.  The one-room schoolhouse of years gone-by is probably more comparable to what our environment looks like than most modern classrooms.

·      The other teacher who I work with occupies the same space and works with the same set of kids.  That means we have opportunities to be collaborative at an unparalleled level.  We essentially get to team teach every grade 10 course.  The opportunities for cross-curricular connections and projects are totally unparalleled.  And that’s to say nothing of the value of having another professional set of eyes on your practice as a teacher.

·      Our students meet over 40 different “teachers” throughout the year in the form of trades professionals, construction supervisors, sales and marketing staff, service providers, and company owners.  Not only do they get a very real opportunity to discover a variety of professions and learn from the people who work in them, they also get to make connections with those professionals, connections that can lead to summer jobs, apprenticeship placements, work experience, and possibly future careers.

At this point, I feel it’s necessary to give credit where credit is due.  I did not invent this program.  I am, at best, an opportunistic thief.  Two educators in Airdrie, Alberta (Jarrett Hooper and Greg Rankin of George McDougall High) conceived the program over the course of a number of morning commutes together four years ago.  A year after forming a partnership with McKee Homes of Airdrie and completing their inaugural year of Building Futures Airdrie, we picked up the program, in partnership with Kingsmith Homes of Cochrane.  The Airdrie school is currently in its third year, while we are in our second.  To say that those two gentlemen have my admiration and gratitude would be a gross understatement.

It’s certainly not a perfect program nor the model upon which I think all education should be crafted.  We encounter challenges in one form or another daily, and I look forward to writing about some of them here.  Nonetheless, it’s been an educational game-changer in my opinion.  Over the course of the next few blog posts, I hope to make a convincing argument that the crux of what makes Building Futures successful should form the backbone of high school transformations in any building where the path to progressive pedagogy is unclear or resisted.  

TL;DR: I teach in a really cool program that is hands-on, authentic, cross-curricular, collaborative, and worth sharing.

Vive la revolution!