The Sustainability Workshop: Putting High School Students to Work on the World's Toughest Problems
This entry has been selected as a finalist in the
Partnering for Excellence: Innovations in Science + Technology + Engineering + Math (STEM) Education competition.
The goal of the Sustainability Workshop is to show that schools can unleash the creative and intellectual potential of young people to solve the world’s toughest problems. How? Most schools teach academic content to prepare students for a distant future, when they might eventually work on the great challenges facing society. We take those challenges as our starting point, and use school to help students find ways to surmount them. Launched in September 2011, the Workshop provides 29 high school seniors the opportunity to spend the entire year working in close collaboration with public, private, and educational partners to develop technologies, policies, and strategies to improve energy efficiency in buildings. Growing the economy while saving the planet: how’s that for a senior project?
About You
About You
First Name
Simon
Last Name
Hauger
About Your Organization
Organization Name
The Workshop School
Organization Website
Organization Phone
215-605-6850
Organization Address
Quarters A, Philadelphia Naval Yard, Philadelphia, Pa
Organization Country
United States, PA, Philadelphia County
Country where this project is creating social impact
United States, PA, Philadelphia County
Is your organization a
Non‐profit/NGO/citizen sector organization
How long has your organization been operating?
Less than a year
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Innovation
Entry Form title
The Sustainability Workshop: Putting High School Students to Work on the World's Toughest Problems
What change do you want to bring to the world?
The goal of the Sustainability Workshop is to show that schools can unleash the creative and intellectual potential of young people to solve the world’s toughest problems. How? Most schools teach academic content to prepare students for a distant future, when they might eventually work on the great challenges facing society. We take those challenges as our starting point, and use school to help students find ways to surmount them. Launched in September 2011, the Workshop provides 29 high school seniors the opportunity to spend the entire year working in close collaboration with public, private, and educational partners to develop technologies, policies, and strategies to improve energy efficiency in buildings. Growing the economy while saving the planet: how’s that for a senior project?
What are the primary activities of your project?
Beginning in September 2011, the Sustainability Workshop will allow 30 high school students to spend their entire senior year at the Philadelphia Navy Yard’s clean energy campus, working on cutting edge projects focused on improving the energy efficiency of building design, construction, and renovation. The Workshop is being launched with three major partners: the Greater Philadelphia Innovation Cluster (GPIC), a $122 million U.S. Department of Energy initiative to create a research and development, business incubation, policy, education and workforce development hub for energy-efficient design and building at the Philadelphia Navy Yard.; the School District of Philadelphia, which will award students course credit for their work; and Drexel University, which will collaborate with the Workshop on its “Eco-House” project and allow student to enroll in courses on campus.
The Workshop curriculum will be divided into two phases. The first phase will introduce students to the fundamentals of clean energy by having teams of students work to increase the energy efficiency of a room within the school, and then within their own homes. The teams will consult with various GPIC partners and Drexel faculty about strategies for maximizing energy efficiency. The second phase will focus on planning and designing the Drexel University Eco-House project. During this phase, students will form small teams focusing on specific GPIC innovations. In keeping with the broad scope of the GPIC’s work, an innovation could be a specific technology, a process, a policy, or some combination of the three.
What is innovative about your initiative? How is it a new contribution to the field?
The Sustainability Workshop represents a unique educational innovation in two respects. First, it focuses the work of teaching and learning around real problems, challenges, and solutions. Making buildings more energy efficient requires improvements in process, technology, design policy, building maintenance and use. These changes require new knowledge, skills, and ways of thinking. For technical innovation to be sustainable, it must be accompanied by educational innovation. At the Workshop, core academic skills such as reading, writing and mathematics are developed through real-world work, problem solving, and application.
Second, the Workshop redesigns the educational experience to support this real-world learning rather than impeding it. In most high schools is there is little room to connect academics to real questions or problems, and no avenue for students to contribute to addressing those problems. This is particularly conspicuous in STEM education, where engineering and technology are too often viewed as complementary to learning in math and science rather than catalysts for it. From the ground up, it is designed to support learning that integrates the questions, problems and challenges that arise in real project settings. The school schedule is organized around projects rather than subjects, testing and evaluation are tied directly to project performance standards, and students themselves share responsibility for designing, planning, and carrying out project work rather than having their teachers do it for them.
What stage is your project in?
Operating for less than a year
Tell us about the community that you engage? eg. economic conditions, political structures, norms and values, demographic trends, history, and experience with engagement efforts.
The Sustainability Workshop engages and ultimately brings together two distinct communities into an innovative collaboration. The first community is the high school students who will attend the Workshop. During our first year we will enroll students from Furness and South Philadelphia High Schools. Both schools are non-selective, comprehensive high schools serving South Philadelphia. Our students will represent the demographic of the city's public schools, meaning that most will be considered minorities and about half will be living at or below to the poverty line.
The second community we will engage is the sustainability and green technology community that is located primarily at the Philadelphia Naval Yard. The Workshop is located at the Naval Yard to foster partnerships between the companies and our students. Many of the companies have already expressed an interest in working with us and our students on projects related to green technology. Our students will be working on real projects with real experts. In terms of STEM learning we see this arrangement as ideal.
The Workshop emerges from 13 years of innovation in an after-school program at West Philadelphia High School in which students design, build and race hybrid cars. The program partnered with more than twenty businesses and organizations, many of which taught the students what they needed to know to make the cars they could imagine a reality. From specialists in lithium batteries to engineers at the Boeing Wind Tunnel, the students learned important STEM skills and competencies from experts in the field.
More impressive than the fact that our students consistently outperform elite universities in national competitions are the educational outcomes they achieve. The program has demonstrated that urban students are capable of achieving far beyond society’s expectations. As President Obama recently said about the program, “What they had was a program that challenged them to solve problems and to work together, to learn and build and create... That’s the potential that we can harness all across America. That’s what will help our young people to fulfill their promise to realize their dreams and to help this nation succeed in the years to come.”
Share the story of the founder and what inspired the founder to start this project
The Sustainability Workshop emerges out of an incredible contradiction. Students who found regular school boring and irrelevant suddenly came alive once the school day ended. They were the same students but the situation was different. Instead of sitting and being instructed they were moving and trying to do things, trying to build cars that would get 100 miles per gallon. They became so interested and absorbed in what they were doing that they would learn that got in their way. The very same kids who would cut classes out of sheer boredom would be found working under a car or on a computer until well into the evening hours. Watching inner-city students compete with and beat students from elite universities in hybrid vehicle competitions set out central challenge: How could we create a school that harnesses the inherent interest, energy, imagination and curiosity of students? That would require us to learn from and partner with communities and experts outside of the school? That would take on real world problems of relevance and significance to our students and us? The Sustainability Workshop is our attempt to create this space, a place where people come together to work and learn from one another in order to solve real world problems. To call it just a school is to miss its radical departure from school as usual. We call it the Workshop, a place of collective tinkering and learning, where skills get learned in the service of larger questions.
Social Impact
This Entry is about (Issues)
Please describe how your project has been successful and how that success is measured
The Workshop is the product of over a decade of experience blending project-based learning with green technology in an urban high school. Founded in 1998 as a summer project, the West Philadelphia High School EVX team has spent the last decade designing, building, and racing alternative energy vehicles. The team won the Tour de Sol, the nation’s largest alternative energy vehicle race, three times and reached the semi-finals of the Progressive Automotive X PRIZE competition, outperforming elite universities and well-funded private companies. This year they won the Green Grand Prix at Watkins Glen International in New York—where their sports car achieved over 100 miles per gallon—and won the Clean Energy division of Conrad Foundation’s Spirit of Innovation Awards, an international competition that challenges high school students to create innovative products using science technology and entrepreneurship to solve real world 21st century problems. Outcomes for individual students are no less impressive. Over the past 13 years, every senior that has graduated while part of the team—about 50 in all—has matriculated into some form of post-secondary education.
Going forward, the Workshop will measure success using three criteria:
1) quality and significance of student contributions to GPIC projects, as judged by faculty and external reviewers.
2) Postsecondary outcomes for graduates, measured through longitudinal tracking surveys.
3) Student gains in problem solving, reasoning, literacy and mathematics, measured through pre- and post assessments benchmarked to world-class standards.
How many people have been impacted by your project?
Fewer than 100
How many people could be impacted by your project in the next three years?
101- 1,000
How will your project evolve over the next three years?
In 2012, the Sustainability Workshop will expand to serve 45 students. In 2013, it will begin converting into a full-time public high school of 200 students. Through its partnership with the School District of Philadelphia, the Workshop will serve as a site of professional learning for other educators, principals, and district leadership. We also have begun forming linkages to local universities to offer pre-service teachers a chance to observe and participate in our unique school culture (Clapper, Downey, Riggan & Hauger, 2010). Our partnership with the GPIC—perhaps the nation’s largest and most ambitious sustainable energy initiative—will enable students to grapple with issues related to green technology and create projects in partnerships with organizations on the Navy Yard Campus.
Sustainability
What barriers might hinder the success of your project and how do you plan to overcome them?
Our most significant potential barrier to success derives from our greatest strength: we are well outside the educational mainstream in our approach. The history of educational innovations is one of regression to the mean; school districts and state education agencies tend to support schools that are familiar to them. A second, related barrier is the current policy trend toward focusing only on test scores as a measure of educational success. This encourages teaching to the test, which in turn limits both pedagogical and curricular options and stifles creativity and innovation.
To address these barriers we will adopt a three-pronged strategy. First, we will be proactive and transparent in our dealings with the state and district to make sure that they fully understand what we are doing with students. Second, we will grow slowly. We want to learn from our experience and take advantage of our failures; growing too quickly jeopardizes that. We can have more of an impact with a small, highly successful project than with a large, mediocre one. Third, our measures of success will both more substantive and more far-reaching than those used by typical schools. We will go beyond reading and math scores to measure whether students can make arguments, write clearly, and reason mathematically. Similarly, we are less interested in whether they graduate than in what they accomplish in the years after they graduate. In other words, we will counter concerns about test scores by using metrics that are both more rigorous and more relevant than the school systems to which we are compared.
Tell us about your partnerships
The Workshop is being launched with three major partners:
1.The Greater Philadelphia Innovation Cluster (GPIC), a $122 million initiative funded by the U.S. Department of Energy to create an research and development, business incubation, policy, education and workforce development hub for energy-efficient design and building at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. The GPIC will connect students to real projects focused on green design and construction.
2.The School District of Philadelphia, which will grant the students course credits equivalent to what they would receive attending their home high school for the year.
3.Drexel University, which will provide Workshop students with the opportunity to enroll in college courses at Drexel and work on the Drexel University Eco-House, an interactive educational project designed to showcase innovations being developed at the GPIC while informing the public (students and adults) about issues of energy efficiency and green technology. GPIC partners would install interactive educational displays designed to demonstrate the innovation, unpack the science or engineering behind it, and explain its importance.
Current annual budget of project, in US dollars
$250,001‐500,000
Explain your selections
In terms of direct funding, the Sustainability Workshop is currently supported by a $150,000 grant from the Greater Philadelphia Innovation Cluster. We have received several smaller donations from corporations, and expect to have secured more substantial funding from private corporations and non-profits in the coming months.
We have also received in-kind support from The Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation in the amount of approximately $60,000 reduction in rent for our space in Quarters A at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. The School District of Philadelphia has also provided us with a substantial technology budget.
How do you plan to strengthen your project in the next three years?
Our primary goal is to strengthen the education our students receive, particularly in STEM related fields, skills and competencies. We will do this in two ways. First, we will work to augment their project work with lessons specifically designed to address what they need to know to solve real-world problems. This means providing students with James Gee calls "just in time learning," or teaching targeted at what students need, want and have to know in order to succeed in their projects, and for that matter their lives. The second part of strengthening our program is developing long term part time pedagogic and practical partnerships with our green technology neighbors at the Philadelphia Naval Base. We will be surrounded by a sea of STEM experience and expertise,and will work to enure that it goes towards our student's education. This means building relationships with corporations that will allow for their employees to work with our students on projects.
Fundraising is the second front we will work to strengthen our project. Right now we are relying on donations, and while we expect to get several large ones in the coming months, we would like to have enough resources to do the kind of innovative work we envision. We will work to become a budget neutral charter school in three years, and continue to raise funds to augment our base education budget. We believe our partnerships will help us in this regard.
Partnerships and Accountability
Please tell us more about how your partnership was formed and how it functions. What specific role does each partner play? What unique resources does each partner bring to the initiative?
Our three primary partnerships create a substantive network for supporting STEM learning. Our partnership with the Greater Philadelphia Innovation Cluster (GPIC), a $122 million initiative funded by the U.S. Department of Energy to create an research and development, business incubation, policy, education and workforce development hub for energy-efficient design and building at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, will serve to connect students to real projects focused on green design and construction. The partnership was formed after we realized that it would serve both of our missions. GPIC will provide STEM expertise and we will use it to educate students in STEM related fields, such as green building and design.
Our partnership with School District of Philadelphia stems from three of us being teachers in the district, and our commitment to quality public education for all children. They will support us as an innovative site in terms of approach (problem/partnership-based STEM learning) and we will support them by serving as a demonstration site for other teachers.
3.Drexel University, a top tier science, math and engineering university, has been working with the EVX team for years. Simon Hauger is a graduate of their electrical engineering program, so has extensive relationships with the institution. Drexel is looking to make a larger impact in the city in terms of STEM learning, and we will work with them on building and showcasing the Drexel University Eco-House, an interactive educational project designed to showcase innovations being developed at the GPIC while informing the public (students and adults) about issues of energy efficiency and green technology. GPIC partners would install interactive educational displays designed to demonstrate the innovation, unpack the science or engineering behind it, and explain its importance.
How are you building in accountability for students' successful STEM learning outcomes? Please provide a summary and examples.
At the Sustainability Workshop students learn STEM in and through working on real-world problems related to green technology and design. Concretely, this means that rather than teach STEM skills out of context, we teach them as students need to know them- and want to know them. Students will have to learn STEM skills and competencies to solve the problems- the accountability is built into an interesting and compelling project.
Our goal is to prepare students to be successful either in college or a career related to STEM, green design or construction We will use four simple, outcome-based metrics to determine whether we are meeting these goals. First, we expect students to improve in core academic skill areas: literacy, mathematics, and problem solving. Second, we expect all of our students to graduate while mastering the content and skills needed to succeed beyond high school. Third, we want all students to have choices, so we expect all of them to pursue multiple career options. This means that all students will be accepted into a two- or four-year college and/or secure gainful employment in a field of their interest. Fourth, and most importantly, we will follow students’ post-secondary path for at least two years after graduation to make sure we have adequately prepared them to succeed in college or the workplace. We will therefore track students beyond graduation to determine whether they are successful in college or in a career.
Needs
Investment, Marketing/Media, Pro-bono help (legal, financial, etc.), Mentorship.
Please use this space to elaborate on your selection above and/or to add needs that may not be listed.
Our primary need is to create a learning institution, which can be quite different from a school. We do not see what students will be doing as anything different than what we will be doing. The problems may be different but the purpose is the same- to learn. We are committed to reflective practices focused on learning from both success and mistakes, and need as much help as possible with how to create an institution that does this on all fronts. We consider ourselves to be opening a hybrid school, a place that takes on the challenges of businesses and nonprofits with the added goal of producing students prepared to succeed in STEM related fields. This means thinking outside of the box in terms of schools and at institutions that while not schools are adept at learning.
Offers
Collaboration/Networking, Innovation/Ideas.
Please use this space to elaborate on your selection above and/or to add offers that may not be listed.
We are very interested in joining a larger community committed to doing STEM education differently. We are not interested in reinventing wheels, and would like to create a larger coalition that reinvigorates STEM education by creating innovative and enduring partnerships around real-world problems. While the Sustainability Workshop is new, its four founders have extensive experience in urban education, and two of them left careers in STEM related field to become science teachers in Philadelphia Public Schools.
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 | 3 weeks ago sam john said: , private, and educational partners to develop technologies, policies, and strategies to improve energy efficiency in buildings. Growing ... about this Competition Entry. - read more > |
| 3 weeks ago Morkel Meller said: The goal of the Sustainability Workshop is to show that schools can unleash the creative and intellectual potential of young people to ... about this Competition Entry. - read more > |
| 86 weeks ago Sharon Newman Ehrlich said: Simon and team, I know how hard all of you have worked on the X Team and this will surely be a great success. Children learn this way ... about this Competition Entry. - read more > |
| 97 weeks ago Simon Hauger updated this Competition Entry. |
| 98 weeks ago Simon Hauger updated this Competition Entry. |
| 98 weeks ago Simon Hauger updated this Competition Entry. |
| 99 weeks ago Simon Hauger updated this Competition Entry. |
| 99 weeks ago Simon Hauger updated this Competition Entry. |
| 99 weeks ago Simon Hauger updated this Competition Entry. |
| 100 weeks ago Simon Hauger updated this Competition Entry. |
