Institute on Early College Pedagogy

Early college — the idea is taking hold. From his perspective in the technological sector, Bill Gates recently argued that high school is obsolete, that it is not equipped to prepare students for the demands of today’s world. His philanthropic support of early college high schools as an alternative reflects his faith that they will serve today’s adolescents better than the traditional high school. To realize this ideal, we must create a learning environment with the rigor of the most challenging college courses that is suitable for younger, sometimes under-prepared students.

Goals
At the seminar, you will experience the practices and approaches that have been successful at Simon’s Rock and Bard High School Early College (BHSEC). You will observe and confer with teachers from both schools as they model techniques that engage students in their own learning process and foster the critical and analytical skills necessary in college and beyond. Working with colleagues from other new early college high schools, you will plan programs and approaches designed to challenges and inspire your students.

Specific Goals:

• To learn strategies used for decades by Simon’s Rock and Bard High School Early College to engage early college students with their academics. You will learn to help students to:
  • become more aware of and develop their thinking and learning processes
  • heighten their critical-analytical and creative skills
  • value writing as a tool for exploration and open-ended learning
  • engage in reasoned academic discourse
  • enjoy the challenges of intellectual work
• To learn how you can adapt these practices to your own discipline or specialized area of study and your home institution’s early college
• To build useful partnerships with other early college professionals
• To understand and contribute to the culture of early college as a distinctive formation in higher education
• To acquire techniques that promote active learning in the classroom

Methods
Participants and school teams will be immersed in a practice through which they will see, by direct observation, the making of a school culture, beginning with first-year college students’ own writing and thinking seminar. Simon’s Rock professors and teachers from Bard High School Early College (located in New York City) will share proven strategies that lead to student success and offer structured consultations with participants to develop specific action plans they can take back to their schools. Seminar participants will observe and participate in workshops with professors from several disciplines working with first-year early college students from Simon’s Rock and Bard High School Early College.

The hallmarks of the early college seminars are:

• creating a learning culture through the use of common practices and approaches
• adapting the “rounds” educational model common in medical schools, whereby participants convene before and after classroom visits for pre-observation discussions and post-observation analysis and intervention planning
• designing a workable plan to apply the pedagogical, curricular, or campus climate tools to participants’ own schools.