| Notes |
Outside, squalls of rain are buffeting the windows, but her first-floor office is a cosy sanctum of bright Persian rugs, antique wooden furniture and a sprinkling of picture frames. White relates how she first came across Big Picture – back in 2003, when she was working with the Victorian Schools Innovation Commission and had been charged with seeking out places around the world where real, transformational learning was taking place. In Columbus, Ohio, she went along to a conference organised by the US Coalition of Essential Schools, an initiative begun in 1987 by Theodore Sizer, a highly respected educator who had been dean of Harvard Graduate School and then a professor at Brown University. "I was just blown away," she says.
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Two decades earlier, Sizer had conducted a five-year study of American high schools. The result was his seminal book, Horace's Compromise: The Dilemma of the American High School. Horace was a fictional character, a composite of every frustrated, over-scheduled, compromise-dogged teacher that Sizer met during those five years on the road. His conclusion: how can a teacher teach a student he doesn't know well – and how many can he know well?
His prescription for reform was simple: dramatically smaller class sizes; personalised learning with deeper dives into fewer subjects; the student as worker, the teacher as coach; the student's mastery of a personal project to be demonstrated to peers, parents and teacher; and assessment to be made on the basis of tasks successfully completed in the real world.
Sizer recruited fellow reformers, academics Dennis Littky and Elliot Washor, to build a new type of school. In 1996, the Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Centre, in downtown Providence, Rhode Island, opened its doors to 50 first-year high-schoolers. Four years later, 48 of them graduated.
In the early 2000s, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and his wife, Melinda, pronounced The Met their favourite high school in the country and, over the next few years, pledged three large grants to see its design replicated in other parts of the US (there are now 65 of them across 16 states). In 2010, the then president Barack Obama added his voice to the general chorus of approval.
In the Ohio conference, White listened, spellbound, as Elliot Washor presented a workshop on The Met's achievements and an education model he was now calling Big Picture. "I wondered if we could make it work in Australia," she continues. "I already knew in my head and my heart that making schools bigger wasn't the answer to the problem of disengagement. We'd already begun experimenting with different teaching strategies here, but Big Picture brought all of those things together into a single, new framework."
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