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K-12 Dive
Promising Practices: How a CTE school overturned schedules for student choice
Ohio’s Butler Tech adapted during the pandemic to move ahead with a
model that allows most Fridays to be used for exploratory and
vocational options.
Kara Arundel
Feb. 19, 2021
The school: Butler Tech is a career and technical education school in
southwest Ohio that serves more than 18,000 adult and high school
students yearly on six campuses. It works with 11 public school
districts to educate nearly 1,600 high school juniors and seniors
full-time, as well as 150 full-time sophomores, according to AJ Huff,
the school's public relations coordinator.
Butler Tech also offers high school students opportunities to earn
college credits tuition-free through the state’s College Credit Plus
program. The school has a 99% graduation rate, according to
Superintendent and CEO Jon Graft.
The high school students who attend Butler apply for admission, but the
school does not look at grades, attendance or discipline history.
Instead, it considers students’ grit, tenacity and passion, Graft said.
The challenge: Butler Tech administrators — aware of workplace
expectations moving away from outdated assembly-line operations and
hierarchical management styles to embrace creativity, teamwork and risk
— wanted to reform high school programming to include more student
voice, choice and freedom to explore passions. They also wanted to
break away from the traditional 45-minute session,
seven-classes-per-day schedule.
The school’s transformational program, however, still had to comply
with state and federal rules for attendance, assessments, core academic
course credits and more. Just as the school launched its reformed
model, a global pandemic threatened to derail the plans.
The approach: In January 2020, Butler Tech began a revamped schedule
called the "5th Day Experience." By reconfiguring schedules, including
eliminating spring break, the school allowed students to have a free
Friday nearly every week to do what they choose on- or off-campus. But
it isn’t a day off.
Graft explained students could choose to work at a job, catch up on
school work, explore other career concentrations at the school, go on
college visits, or take one-time courses offered at the school such as
driver’s education or AP test prep.
The school also developed student schedules that allowed more daily
continuous time for lab work in career concentrations while not
shortening the length of core academic courses.
“Our job is to facilitate and foster that passion and purpose so that
[students] can make an impact on this world,” Graft said recently. “I
think we've lost focus that in education, in general, we try to do this
top-down approach where we're the keepers of the knowledge. Well, every
kid has more knowledge in this than we're ever going to have. We need
to facilitate the passion and purpose to direct them into what it is
that they want to do for the rest of their lives.”
What happened: Five weeks after launching the 5th Day Experience, the
pandemic forced Butler Tech’s campuses to shut down and instruction and
learning to take place remotely. The rest of the spring semester was
focused on figuring out how to transition hands-on lab work to remote
learning platforms and making sure students had internet access and
stayed engaged, Graft said.
Instructors had to adapt their technology, bioscience, art and natural
science lab lessons into virtual settings. For example, mechatronics
instructor Dave Campbell, whose on-campus classroom is a 5,000
square-foot open lab with a variety of equipment such as 3D printers
and industrial robots, was able to share simulations of programmable
logic controllers remotely with students. He also created online
breakout rooms where students could present projects and demonstrations
to their peers.
Culinary student Dillon “Smitty” Smith, 17, developed recipes with
ingredients he had at home and made tutorial videos describing the
different techniques he used.
When school administrators began planning for the 2020-21 school year,
they decided to reinstate the 5th Day Experience into the hybrid
learning model. It was risky because no one knew if students would
choose to come to campus on Fridays, Graft said.
It was also logistically challenging because the school had to develop
a website and database to manage sign-up schedules to make sure the
campuses would not be over capacity due to social distancing measures.
At the same time, it sought to maximize the time students spent in labs
or studios working on lessons in their career concentrations, as well
as prioritize core academic courses.
Areas of adjustment: While students and staff were quarantining at home
last spring, school staff were concerned students would become
frustrated about the lack of both social interactions and exposure to
hands-on experiences with equipment in lab classrooms. So they used the
experience to allow students to sign up for mini-lessons with a variety
of instructors.
Students also began showcasing their talents to the school community.
Instructors invited dance and music performers in Los Angeles and
Nashville to be virtual guest speakers, and the school held a virtual
music night with a DJ.
Instructors “were going to be passionately persistent at making sure
that they were keeping the connections with their students and whether
they were allowed to see them in the buildings or not, they were going
to do whatever it took in order to make it happen,” Graft said.
Another area of adjustment was a project the school had started in 2019
to film "The Education Revolution," a documentary about the school’s
mission to support students’ individualized learning and passions. When
the campuses closed due to COVID-19, it was uncertain whether that
project could continue. But for a school willing to take risks even if
it’s to fail, the film’s team decided to make the pandemic part of the
story.
The results: School leaders learned students and staff were eager to
return to campuses and embraced the 5th Day Experience, even in its
hybrid status. The pandemic also made the commitment to the 5th Day
Experience stronger, said Graft. “I think it ignited and became even
more of a catalyst,” he said. “We had the flame lit. [The pandemic]
sort of just threw gasoline on it for us.”
He added: “The whole thing was really driven [because] the kids want to
be here. They don't have to be here. They want to be here. That's a
huge difference when we can put the ownership of learning back on their
plate.”
The on-campus 5th Day experiences are popular not only for the
students, but for staff as well. Although Campbell typically teaches
students about complex engineering applications, one recent Friday, he
taught a one-time basic bicycle maintenance class.
“I had about half a dozen kids that said they wanted to learn and we
learned how to change a flat tire,” Campbell said. “We learned how to
adjust brakes and ride bikes safely.”
Culinary student Dillon Smith says the revised schedule gives him more
continuous time in the kitchen in the mornings and allows him to focus
on core academic subjects in the afternoons. He recently was the lead
chef on the first day Café Lee, the school’s student-run restaurant,
opened for business this year.
“The Education Revolution” premiered Feb. 9. School leaders, and
students hope that by sharing Butler Tech’s story, other schools will
be encouraged to give students more authority in their educational
experiences.
“If we don't have other people join the revolution with us, if we're
the only ones doing it, then it's not a revolution,” said Huff, the
school’s public relations coordinator.
Read this and other stories at K-12 Dive
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