There’s a new era in education for Gunnison Valley School students

Gunnison Valley School does away with grades

After 14 years of providing an alternative education to students who don’t fit the traditional high school mold, the Gunnison Valley School (GVS) is looking for an alternative of its own.

Neil Coen, the school’s principal, says his students and staff are ready for a shift to a system with no grades for kids to be discouraged by—a system that is centered on the student and learning, not the teacher and testing.
So the move has been made in the Valley School’s final session of the school year to implement a version of the Reinventing Schools Coalition (RISC) model that will give students the freedom to advance when they’re ready, and give back when they’re able.
According to Coen, “The RISC model is learning and learner based, not teacher and time based.”
The school is using one of only four programs of its kind in Colorado. While the entire state of Maine and large districts like Adams County School District 50 are implementing similar programs, GVS is unique in offering a standards-based education to high school students.  
And the program is potentially a perfect fit for the school and its students.
Coen says early in the school’s existence, the staff had a hard time balancing the needs of the at-risk youth the school serves and the requirements of a traditional high school model.
When he first asked in December for permission to go ahead with the program, Coen told the school board that the “nature of our instruction makes recordkeeping difficult,” and it is difficult to assess the abilities of students who enter near the end of a high school career to meet the state’s expectations.
When director of curriculum, learning and assessment Dan Schmidt came to the district last year, he sat down with Coen to discuss how the experiential learning and alternative style education that had been so successful at the school could be bolstered by a more rigorous curriculum.
The rigor isn’t just for the students but also “for the staff that has to be rigorous about stuff that we need statutorily, like attendance, scheduling and book keeping,” Superintendent Jon Nelson points out. “How can we do that and still maintain the relational pieces that are built over here that have been done for years?”
What Schmidt suggested was some variation of the RISC model. Coen knew that he had found the missing piece to the puzzle of providing a complete education to his students in a program developed in a rural school district in Alaska by an innovative teacher.
“After having a very careful close look at this model we realized that this was probably ideal for accomplishing the one thing we had hoped to accomplish,” Coen says.
Like Coen at GVS, Richard DeLorenzo developed the RISC model as an answer to a problem in his Alaskan school district. Graduation rates from the tiny, dispersed Chugach district were less than 20 percent and for several years, no one from the district went on to college.
What DeLorenzo proposed was a dramatic shift that did away with traditional grades and ways of assessing student performance, replacing them with levels of understanding. The first level would be the first time a student sees the material and the next would be an ability to work through material with a teacher’s help.
To move onto the next level of coursework, students in DeLorenzo’s model would have to prove that they had a complete understanding of a subject. Students who advance beyond a simple, but complete, understanding have the chance to teach their peers.
“It’s a lot like a video game,” Coen says. “Kids today can get a video game and know exactly what’s coming. There are 12 levels in this video game and they have to develop certain skills to get from one level to the next. Then you have a new set of skills you have to develop.”
When Coen approached the school board with the idea of following in DeLorenzo’s footsteps last December, there was a mix of excitement and curiosity at the suggestion of such a dramatic first step. But the veteran high school principal quelled the concern with the confidence of someone who has met with DeLorenzo, researched the idea and seen success as a result.
“We’re not asking you to commit the whole district to this process,” Coen said. “We’re just asking you to consider allowing us to experiment with this.”
Finding a RISC-based structure that would fit the school and its students was only the beginning of the challenge. Coen and his staff still had to come up with an effective way of assessing where students would fit into the structure they had developed.
“We have to develop assessments that are authentic, so if a kid comes in their junior year from a traditional setting, we know where they fall on their skills level,” Coen says, “so this is going to involve a tremendous amount of ground work.”
But once students are in the program and teachers know what they’re working with, the way forward is clear, which might be part of the RISC model’s success.
“Our goal here is to say, ‘We want to affirm any path that works for you and we also want to help you find what your learning style is. We actually have to help you find your learning style,’” Coen says. “The expectations you couldn’t meet before you suddenly find that you can meet, not just well but wonderfully. In this model there’s really no such thing as failure. Everybody succeeds in this model.”
Coen thinks students who know what they need to do to graduate will take the initiative to master the necessary skills because they know that’s what is expected. It isn’t going to be a problem of mastering the skills too slowly, but just the opposite.
Mastering one subject will give students more time to work on areas where they’re struggling and they’ll be able to help their classmates who could benefit from some help from an equal instead of an instructor. During a recent trip to GVS, Schmidt watched as a student taught a study session that illustrated the reasons a RISC model would work at the school.
“Another student goes, ‘That’s not the way I did it,’ and they stood there at the white board for the last 10 to 15 minutes of class kind of picking on one another about doing the problem wrong. But they came to the same right answer,” Schmidt remembers. “They got to the end point using different methodology and that, really, is on display of what we’re trying to do.”
With lessons like instilling an eagerness to learn in students, coupled with the goal of graduation, Coen thinks the problem might be keeping kids from moving through the program too fast. So part of the solution is a standard at the school for a range of things, not just academics.
“If, during academic time, you’re committed to being a jerk, it’s doubtful that you’re ever going to get a diploma from here,” he says.
It’s all part of giving a student who might have been pushed aside in any other classroom a chance to excel, contribute to the success of his peers and develop an understanding of what it means to learn. For Coen and his staff it’s a part of seeing graduates succeed in the real world.
And the cost of success is high, especially for the teachers and staff at GVS whose job is it is to assess the abilities of every student. Even in a school that could never have more than 32 students, without approval of the school board, that’s a lot of work.
But the teachers at the Valley School aren’t your average instructors.
“There’s a high start-up investment for the staff,” Coen admits. “But these guys are already high-investment. They signed up for this of their own free will a long time ago, and so when we presented them with the idea they were with it. They just want to see these kids succeed.”
And as the program ages, students will rise through the ranks to take some of the burden from teachers, freeing them up for more personalized instruction and assessments.
Coen convinced the school board in December that his plan was a good one, and the school started the fourth term with the new system in place, without grades and without grading.