Project Profile:

Project Name:  Sustainable Communication Ecology in Bottom of the Pyramid Urban High Schools

Contact Person:  Michael Josefowicz

Mailing Address: 460 First Street, Brooklyn, New York

E-mail: Michael.Josefowicz@gmail.com

Phone: (718) 788 1032  or (917) 881 4678 mobile

 

Project Objective

To articulate the neccesary mechanisms of a communication ecology that can lead to predictable growth and metrics in the growth of Professional Learning Communities.

 

Age/Grade/Characteristics of Students Served

"Bottom of the Pyramid" High School students. Focusing on the disengaged who are drop-outs or under acheiving.

 

School District/Schools Involved

New York City CTE High Schools

 

Funding Sources and Sustainability Plan

• To be determined

 

We have been engaged with Chelsea CTE High School for two years as of December 2007.

The first year and a half as volunteer. Since September we have a $10,000 comittment through January with the expectation that the commitment will extend to June.  The vehicle for payment is Josefowicz Asscoiates LLC which now has a Dept of Ed vendor number.

 

Our approach has five steps:

1. Locating evangelists.

2. Identify and nurture potential teacher team leaders.

3. Identify projects that are important to those potential leaders.

4. Create "professional learning teams" in the proximate service of managing those projects to successful completion.

5. To extend the earned learnings to nurture the evolution of a professional learning community in the school building.

 

The technology is pbwiki + survey monkey + basecamp + gmail.

 

 

What services are provided to students? Families? Others?

Two teacher evangelists have been entangled as of December, 2007. 

Three proto learning teams have been created.

 

1. College Bound Project.

With the focus on getting a significant portion of the Senior class of 2007 (appx 200 students) enrolled in Higher Education. The potential team leaders is Ms Ella Ware-Simpson, AP of the Soho Business Academy at Chelsea CTE High School.

 

2. Memoir Writing Project.

The potential team leader is Ms. Moody, a literacy mentor at Chelsea CTE High School. The focus is on creating published memoirs for 2 classes that are being mentored by Ms Moody.

 

3. the nyc.CIAA Project. 

Cyrano Interns Advertising Agency. The potential team leader is Ms Kiri Bermack. The focus is to give students in the Soho Communication Arts Academy access to a student run advertising agency in the service of giving them a protected and mentored real world experience.

 

4. The Attendance Intervention Project. While the processes and tools are in place, this project is waiting the location of a potential team leader on the ground.

 

What are the results to date?

The following results have been achieved by one person investing a total of 168 hours.

The time was divided between 7 hours of face time per week, and 18/6 internet accesssibility and time as necessary.

 

1. Two of the three early evangelists, computerphobes and completely dependent on traditional means of communication, have integrated email communication into their behavior.

 

2. A wireframe of a inward facing website has been created and populated.  A group of faculty and at least one student are becoming engaged with the site to function as a real world focus group. The expectation is that in the second semester

 

3. Using the wireframe we were able to gather contact information, expression of non school interests, and mission critical college application informaton  from over 130 students in appx 20 minutes of teacher or admin time. We have reorganized that information so that it becomes more actionable intelligence for the teacher "team" that is involved with the College Bound project. The challenge is to turn what is essentially a group, with one highly incented by very distracted AP, into a team that can execute.

 

4. We have engaged the interest of Trekk media, who has installed a prototype of a web based functionality that allows a teacher to type in the name of a student push one button, and an text message is sent to the student's mobile phone, the guardian's mobile phone, and whatever emails are on file.

Once we have located a potential team leader for the the Attendance Intervention Project, this functionality will be used. The hypothesis is that if timely notification is sent to the appropriate people, this could supply a significant "push" to increase attendance.

 

What challenges is the program facing?

The interventions are taking much more time than is necessary because of the difficulty of getting focus from the administrations. Like many "consulting" engagmenta it is relaitvely easy for the administration to committ funds that have to be spent. But very difficult to get educational admins, especially in dysfunctional hgih schools to committ the focus.  Continuing along the path of "selling" this program building by building will require a significant investment of time in non value producing activity.

 

What partnerships has the project developed?

Because of the ground up approach it has been too time consuming thus far to usefully engage the readily accesible centers of excellance.

 

Given the trust  and respect that Michael Josefowicz has built in thirty five years of activity with people and organizations in the communications space it is plausible that when  well defined and professionally managed mentorship and internship programs  are implemented, many commercial and voluntary organizations will be eager to be involved in improving the High School student experience.

 

 

 

What can you offer to other communities and schools that are interested in developing Professional Learning Communities?

 

As we articulate mechanisms that work, and define the conditiions under which they can be optimized, we can take an ill defined problem and define it so that information technology can play a more significant role in scaling the most fertile communication ecology.