Inside Innovative Schools

Reinventing high schools is hard work, and large-scale change can’t happen without the dedication and effort of countless teachers, administrators and students. We recognize how important it is to understand what it’s like for those on the front lines of change — and to learn from their experiences. So we employ a new strategy called storytelling to capture what’s going on in innovative schools, up close and personal.

Our inside looks at high school reform include:

• A series of publications called Every Student Deserves a Legacy chronicle day-to-day life in schools struggling with change. These stories record the triumphs and setbacks, progress and problems of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

• The Reality Check student video project lets teenagers in some of Ohio’s new high schools tell their own stories.
• Our storytelling blog from Metro High School in Columbus takes you inside a school that combines early college with an emphasis on science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) in unique and effective ways.

About storytelling

In the spring of 2004, KnowledgeWorks Foundation brought together a group of respected writers from around Ohio to witness and write about urban school reform. The team spent hundreds of hours inside small school and early college programs, watching students, teachers and administrators undergo the growing pains of school transformation.

The idea behind storytelling wasn’t an easy sell: to tell the authentic stories of the challenges these schools faced, and not to sugarcoat the inevitable difficulties of urban schools with financial crises and other long-entrenched problems. The storytellers sat in on classes, staff meetings, professional development sessions, school assemblies and field trips, trying to capture a sense of not only the complexities of the challenges, but the personal  stories of a few of the people involved. The group met several times a year to share and workshop the writing, compare notes and debate the best ways to present these narratives.

The result was a series of national award-winning publications that capture efforts to transform underperforming large urban high schools into small personalized schools or to pioneer schools that blend high school and college – stories that reveal the missteps, lessons learned and successful strategies that are boosting graduate rates and sending urban students to college.

The storytelling publications helped build support for the change process long before statistics could document success and created greater understanding of what was happening, as well as why it was so hard. Here's what Deborah S. Delisle, Ohio Superintendent for Public Instruction, said about the Legacy project:

"These stories from inside classrooms demonstrate that making a significant difference is extremely challenging work. They also offer compelling tales of focused vision, determination, creativity, bravery and success.

"I encourage everyone who cares about the future of educating all of our students to read and reread these stories. You will gain wisdom from the journeys that these schools have undertaken. Absorb the feelings of hope that such reform holds and know that the changes that are required to meet our students’ needs will take the best that each of us has to offer. Join the journey, believe in all of our students, and support this challenging work!"

We used the same approach in a different format to chronicle life in a school that combines several innovative ideas. Metro School in Columbus is an early college high school with an emphasis on STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) that is at the leading edge of high school innovation. We share its story in real time using a blog format.

Storytelling for other initiatives

The storytelling approach is highly effective in getting out a message that connects with stakeholders and the general public. Ohio Education Matters is available to consult on how storytelling could be put into practice for other initiatives in Ohio.