Planning for a new school year never ceases to strike me as an odd endeavor. Barely halfway through any given year, some of us begin to focus on the year ahead. While many decisions cannot be made until more is known about what the year will look like (and, oh, wow never has that been more true than this moment in time), there are some decisions that have been there waiting for us to move on them.
For us at Portfolio School adopting a new learning platform was one of those obvious decisions. As a school team we recognized a desire to utilize technology in a way that not only allowed us to stay organised and collaborative, but most importantly allowed - hopefully even insisted - students take increased ownership of their learning experiences. After an exhaustive search, we ultimately landed on the Altitude Platform.*
An ideal learning platform - often referred to as a Learning Management System or LMS - provides a digital space for teachers and students to plan learning experiences, collaborate and document learning along the way, set goals for important work, formally and informally assess learning, and share work with others. A distinct advantage we found with the Altitude platform is that it is accessible to learners of all ages. Starting in kindergarten, we will be able to seamlessly include students in the process of documenting and assessing their learning.
And a bonus: not long after we became a member school, the team at Altitude launched the Learner-Centered Collaborative (LCC).
In their joint blog post announcing the launch of the LCC, cofounders Devin Vodicka and Katie Martin write, “we envision a world where learners have agency, skills to collaborate with others, and opportunities to engage in solving problems that matter to them and their world.” I get tingles reading this - YES, this is what we want for our learners. When I say learners, I am not just referencing students. Rather, I am thinking about everyone who participates in a school. To be a teacher is to be a learner. To be a parent is to be a learner. Uniquely, for a student it is their job to be a learner (what a cool job!).
Portfolio School is a place where students come to experience learning through everything they do, see, and interact with in the world. Our goals are for their projects to inspire curiosity, collaboration, a growth mindset, and an ever increasing understanding of the world around them AND who they are. I believe that through working with the LCC and utilizing the Altitude Platform, we will better enable our students and ourselves - teachers and parents - to tell the full story of this deep learning that happens day-to-day and year-to-year.
As a start, I have been working with the teaching team over the summer to dig deeply into our planning process, iterating on our milestones and further developing the mechanisms with which we plan and execute projects with students starting in kindergarten. I have come to realize that this work will never be “done”. There will always be something new to learn - often from the students themselves, but also from seeking opportunities to delve into these practices with educators around the country.
In the post, Katie and Devin go on to talk about how the work of building schools is one of agency and responsibility and that we cannot do it by ourselves. As the saying goes, we can go faster alone, but in this work - as in most - we can go further together. It is with great excitement that we look forward to learning from and with the team at the Learner-Centered Collaborative and the many schools that are a part of this organization. In the spirit of modeling what it means to be a lifelong learner, we eagerly embrace everything that comes with starting something new!
*Full disclosure: I worked for a version of this company in the past and have remained an avid supporter. We did look at many other platforms - many of them truly remarkable, but none of them provided all of the things that will be available to us in the Altitude platform.