Larissa Pahomov - Authentic Learning in the Digital Age: Engaging Students Through Inquiry

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What happens when reality exceeds the dream you had?

This book is, in many ways, the answer to that question. In 2005, I was hired by the school district of Philadelphia to work on the school that, in September 2006, opened its doors as the Science Leadership Academy (SLA), an inquiry-driven, project-based high school formed in partnership between the school district and The Franklin Institute, Philadelphia's famous science and technology museum.

The founding ideas of Science Leadership Academythe concept that students can ask powerful questions and create meaningful artifacts of their learning in a caring environmentare simple ones, grounded in the work of many educators who have come before us. We have worked to marry those ideas to the promise of the new technologies of our age, along with systems and structures to make it easy for anyone coming into our communitystudents, teachers, or parentsto ramp up to the kind of learning we value most at SLA.

That basic frameworka few powerful ideas with clear structures for implementationpaired with the truly inspiring goodwill, intelligence, and passion of the many teachers, students, and parents who took on the challenge of building a school together has created a school that matters. As principal and founder of the school, I am awed on a daily basis by the incredible work that is done by the teachers and students who make up our community. The ideas that fly around our classrooms, the amazing projects that students do, and the undeniable pride that our students take in their school all exceed the highest expectations I had any right to have back in 2005.

One of the most frequent questions I get is, "What has changed about what you believe since you started SLA?" And, interestingly, there are subtle changes in much about the way we think about all our big ideas since we started, but, if anything, I think we believe more deeply in those ideas now than we did then. Back then, we had a sense we were onto something, but, really, we had no idea how it was going to turn out. Eight years into the experiment, we find ourselves falling back on our best ideas time and time again. The ideas that asking good questions, caring about the people around us, and building structures that make it easier for people to succeed have grounded us in all the conversations we have at SLA, and, more often than not, those core concepts provide the framework that allows us to answer the new questions and challenges we face.

But simple doesn't mean easy. The work and the ideas that you will read in this book are the result of hours of collaboration and discussion and even, sometimes, arguments. The work we do, while we take a lot of pride in it, often still feels like work. There are days, like in any schoolor any community reallywhere we get frustrated or don't feel good about what we are doing or feel like we are failing. But that is where the ethic of care really comes into play. What you will see come out in these pages is a community of learners who truly do care for one another. And when you are asking people to do the hard work of authentic, empowering learning, that care is essential. The work people at SLA do is hard. It is taxing. It is frustrating. And yes, it is exciting and awesome, too, but without a caring community to get you through the hard parts, many of usincluding mewould fall short of many of our goals.

And that care doesn't end at the schoolhouse door. One of the many things that amaze me about our community at SLA is how much everyone really does believe that our school has the responsibility to share what we do with the world. Whether it is through their writing, through the work we do as Dell's Center of Excellence, or through the many conferences where SLA teachers and students facilitate meaningful conversations about education, the SLA community has taken up the mission of trying to make the world of education a better place by sharing their work and their stories. This book is a powerful representation of that task.

And in this book, Larissa Pahomov has the unenviable task of taking the work of 25 teachers and 500 students and distilling the ideas, passions, systems, and structures of the school so that other educators can learn from what we have done. Larissa is perfectly suited to the task, so much so that while working on the project, she referred to it as "the school's book," and the proceeds from its sale are going directly to SLA.

Larissa has taken the voices of our communitystudents, teachers, partners, and even meand woven them together with the systems and structures and ideas we have built together to create what I hope you find to be both an immensely readable and powerfully useful book. It is not meant to be read as a proscriptive "This is the way to do school now" textto do that would be to miss the very point of our school. Read it as a book of vision, of structures, of plans and of voices, and use it to help refine your own vision and voice of what school and learning can be.

The community of learners of SLA has taken a dream I hadthat school could be better than it wasand made it greater than I had a right to imagine. Larissa has done an amazing job of wrangling that dream into a text sheand wecan be proud to share. Enjoy.

Chris Lehmann
Principal, Science Leadership Academy

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If you are reading this book, you are likely already committed to (or are at least interested in making the shift to) working in an inquiry-based classroom. You believe that students should be constructing knowledge instead of having teachers hand it to them. You avoid delivering lectures and like to give students some kind of choice in their assignments, favoring projects and papers over tests and quizzes. You create opportunities for students to teach and learn from each other. When you were preparing to be a teacher, you read the works of John Dewey, and you agreed with him: "Knowledge, in the sense of information, means the working capital, the indispensable resources, of further inquiry; of finding out, or learning, more things" (Dewey, 1916).

Almost 100 years after he published Democracy and Education, Dewey's words have never been truer. As the amount of information available to us explodes, as well as our access to it, what matters is not what students know but how they acquire that knowledge and what they can do with it. In terms of employment, mastering a single set of knowledge hardly helps a student. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that students who go to college have an average of 11.7 different jobs in a lifetime (see www.bls.gov/nls/nlsy79r24jobsbyedu.pdf)and this data is based on baby boomers, who have benefited from more job security than their children. Cognitive skills such as conducting independent research, assessing information for credibility, applying concepts to new situations, and self-critiquing one's own abilities are central to our success in today's working worldand, more important, to our lives as learners and human beings. In the words of education theorist Will Richardson (2012), we have begun "crafting a new narrative around learning"one that he witnessed firsthand when his teenage son leveraged many different information sources in order to figure out how to play the video game Minecraft. Richardson describes the joys but also the implied perils of this narrative in his book Why School? (2012): "In this new story, real learning happens anywhere, anytime, with anyone we likenot just with a teacher and some same-age peers, in a classroom, from September to June. More important, it happens around things we learners choose to learn, not what someone else tells us to learn."