Unpacking the Core Components and Driving Qualities of City as Our Campussm 

 Research Executive Summary by Jennifer Iriti, Ph.D. and Courtney Long Evaluation for Learning Group, Learning Research and Development at University of Pittsburgh 

Research Executive Summary adapted for toolkit by Winchester Thurston School. 

  

Research Purpose and Design 

This study, conducted during the 2017-2018 academic year, was designed to provide Winchester Thurston School (WT) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with evidence-grounded insight on the implementation of City as Our Campus that could support both internal continuous improvement efforts and produce documentation of critical program components to support communication with external audiences.  

To realize this goal, two questions guided the inquiry: 

1. What are the core components of the City as Our Campus model and what resources are needed to enact the model? 

2. What are the core programmatic values and implementation qualities that guide the model? 

To obtain a holistic understanding of City as Our Campus, the study drew on a variety of sources that provided robust information from multiple stakeholder perspectives. Sources included interviews with Winchester Thurston administrators, teachers, and external partners; focus groups with students; a faculty survey; and program documents. Deeper examination of six City as Our Campus experiences (this study’s focal projects) provided detailed information about the implementation and design of the program.    

 

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Intended Outcomes   Community-based learning initiatives, like City as Our Campus, often have a variety of core purposes. Through various data sources, this study identified four key outcome domains for Winchester Thurston School.  

This study also confirmed that Winchester Thurston’s intended goals for the program were aligned with stakeholders’ perceptions of the program.    

Student Learning and Engagement  Across data sources, a range of core goals for students emerged and coalesced around three distinct competency areas:  Developing Active and Engaged Community Members 

● Building students’ civic awareness and connectedness by broadening their sense of the resources and activity available in Pittsburgh. 

● Developing students as agents of change within their communities with a corresponding sense of responsibility for the world around them.  

● Instilling a sense of humility in students and the ability to consider, value, and understand the perspective of others.  

 Building Skills to be Productive and Successful  

● Developing students’ sense of identity by helping them gain a better understanding of themselves and others through connections with the community and issues around them.  

● Supporting students’ comfort and familiarity with people from diverse backgrounds and situations.  ● Growing positive Habits of Mind, like persistence, listening with empathy, thinking flexibly, taking 

responsible risks, etc. ● Advancing students’ 21st Century Skills, like critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, 

communication, flexibility, etc.  

Ensuring Academic Preparedness ● Developing content knowledge in ways that 

allow students to connect to real-world applications and see the value of the knowledge in context.  

● Building critical process skills that are used within disciplines to generate and/or apply content knowledge.  

● Exposure to and familiarity with critical tools and resources that are often central to engagement in specific career fields.  

 

   

 

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Teacher Development Another outcome of City as Our Campus reported within the data was providing growth opportunities for WT teachers. The development opportunities tended to center around: 

● Expanding teacher knowledge and skills by broadening and stretching their access to resources and expertise, which often supports their learning alongside the students.  

● Shifting teachers’ practice to serve in a facilitation role rather than a more traditional expert role to foreground the process of learning rather than only the disciplinary content.  

● Strengthening teachers’ sense of of professionalism and empowerment.   

School Goals  The data also suggested that City as Our Campus has outcomes intended to advance broader school goals beyond those that directly apply to students and teachers.  

● Enacting of Winchester Thurston’s Mission, credo, and core values, especially in relation to character development.  

● Providing Winchester Thurston with a unique identity and a way to differentiate itself from other schools.  

 

Community Conditions Of all the intended outcomes, impact on the community condition is the most nascent based on the data collected in this study. Although City as Our Campus helps to make connections to the community and explores issues impacting the community, much of the focus of the program is on the opportunities for student learning at Winchester Thurston. Interviews with both administrators and teachers surfaced a desire to strengthen this focus to increase the community impact.   

 Activity: Intended Outcomes How does community-based learning align with your school’s mission?

 

   

What goals/outcomes do you hope to achieve through community-based learning?     

   

 

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Core Components of City as Our Campus  Program Design The current City as Our Campus program model is the result of an iterative, responsive design and implementation process that has evolved as the school’s needs and teacher needs have shifted. The responsive nature of the program has proved to be a critical lever for faculty engagement and has ensured the needs of the teachers and students are met.   Program Management The City as Our Campus program director acts as a connector of the program to provide necessary connections between teachers, students, and resources. The program director also acts as a support for teachers in the development and implementation of community-based learning experiences.   Faculty Supports The faculty professional development model, or Faculty Formative Development program, incorporates community-based learning efforts while taking a growth, rather than accountability, orientation to support risk-taking among teachers in their practice.   

 Experience Development City as Our Campus experiences include a continuum of experience intensity levels, ranging from moments (one-time workshops, performances, guest speakers), project-based learning experiences, and year-long courses. This continuum is intended to respond to the variation in valued learning goals for students. It also accommodates teachers’ various comfort levels with the pedagogical demands of more intensive projects to allow for multiple entry points to participation.   

Progression of Learning There is an intentional progression for the purpose of City as Our Campus experiences across Kindergarten to grade 12. This progression emphasizes engagement and exploration in the lower grades and moves to a stronger emphasis on effecting change in the upper grades. This progression of learning, which is directly connected to the core academic curriculum, enabled the program to be authentically implemented across every grade level.   

 

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Critical Components   One of the key objectives of this study was to identify critical components of the City as Our Campus model. Critical components are elements and functions of the model that must be present to reach desired outcomes. Each of the critical components that emerged from the data contributed to one or more of the three overarching goals of the program implementation.   Creating Opportunity for the Experiences A big hurdle in the implementation of the City as Our Campus model is creating conditions that allow the experiences to be designed, implemented, and sustained. Engaging teachers in this design work requires particular resources, structures, and cultural characteristics, such as: 

● Support for teachers to design and implement projects, e.g. thought partners, logistics management, time for collaboration, access to resources 

● Flexible program model with a range of opportunities for teachers to engage 

● Culture of flexibility, creativity, and risk-taking for teachers and their students 

● School structure that is conducive to regular off-site experiences, e.g. school schedule 

● Communication of the opportunities available to teachers and students  ● Funds to engage community resources, e.g. transportation, partner fees 

 Ensuring Coherence Given the diversity of City as Our Campus experiences and the needs of teachers and students, it is essential that the program has mechanisms to support coherence within the initiative. Without coherence, the program might become fragmented, siloed, or lose its ability to have systemic impact. To achieve coherence, all stakeholders must work from the same understanding of the purpose and expectations of community-based learning experiences. The data suggest that coherence within this model is achieved through the following characteristics: 

● Clear connection to the curricular goals and school mission ● Common language with codified purposes and definitions to support experience design ● Coordinated and published experiences across all grade levels ● Within-experience assessments fit with community-based and project-based learning model with 

common tools to assess desired student outcomes ● Routines and opportunities for cross-school sharing of 

work ● Opportunities for individual and collective reflection 

and troubleshooting, which then informs the iterative and flexible program model 

● Person/people to oversee and integrate initiative   

 

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Attaining Alignment with the Broader School Not only is it important to have coherence within City as Our Campus, it is also crucial that the content of the program is aligned with the school more broadly. Without this alignment, coherence would be more difficult to achieve and sustainability would be jeopardized. Additionally, the program could feel separate from the core academic program. The study found that alignment with the broader school is achieved through the following characteristics:  

● School mission and vision that clearly aligns with goals of community- based learning ● A curriculum with a K-12 scope, sequence, and assessment aligned with core programmatic goals ● Faculty professional development and evaluation system conducive to community-based learning 

with a continuous improvement model ● Vision of teaching that differs from traditional expectations of the role of teachers  ● Flexible structure to accommodate ambiguous nature of community-based learning and resources ● School budget line that demonstrates investment in approach 

  

 

Activity: Your Critical Components What critical components exist at your school to support community-based learning?  What is missing? 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Implementation Qualities  

In addition to the core values and critical components, the study also surfaced a set of implementation qualities that seemed to guide how City as Our Campus is designed and implemented.   Choice and Freedom Both students and teachers note that choice and freedom to pursue passions and personal interests are the most critical factors for distinguishing City as Our Campus from other pedagogical approaches. For students, the amount of choice and freedom in the experience directly contributed to their engagement and enjoyment. In focus groups, students suggested that without this choice and freedom, they may not have pushed themselves or worked as hard as they did.   Process-Focused Within the City as Our Campus program model, how something is learned is equally important as what is learned. Teachers and students both report that this approach to learning, and the context in which learning occurs, brings depth and meaning to the content.   Holistic and Authentic The real-world is full of ambiguity and complexibility. The City as Our Campus model embraces these aspects through curriculum-aligned experiences. In traditional approaches, teaching and learning often occurs in discrete moments in the curriculum that may be well-defined and controllable. Since City as Our Campus creates authentic experiences that are naturally more ambiguous and afford the teacher less control, students have the opportunity to see all of the complexity and gray areas that may not be as evident in traditional styles of teaching and learning.   

Flexibility Flexibility is an important implementation quality at both the experience and the program model level. At the experience level, it is important for teacher-designed projects to be able to change and evolve based on the needs and interests of the students. Teachers also need to be flexible as there are times when partners and/or resources that were available in the planning stages end up unavailable for implementation, or when schedule changes require adjustments to plans. This also requires the administration to be flexible and comfortable with plans evolving over time.    

 

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Value-Added by City as Our Campus   Pedagogical practices like community-based learning take considerably more time, effort, and funding over traditional approaches. This study, based on conversations with students, teachers, and administrators, determined that benefits attained through City as Our Campus are unlikely to be attained through more traditional approaches.  

 Student Benefits The most cited aspect of City as Our Campus that stakeholders believe adds value is the opportunity for students to have real-world, authentic learning experiences. City as Our Campus opens the door of the school and allows them to experience the content they are learning as it exists in the community. Teachers believe having these experiences broadens what students get to experience through school and allows students to gain human connection, relevance of content, and deeper meaning than they might attain in more traditional approaches.   Human Connection to the Material Students are able to learn from those doing the work in their community and/or those who are experiencing what the students are learning about. In many experiences, students are working with external partners who have particular expertise. The direct connection with experts provides a different level of credibility to the content and provides students with a relationship that links them to content. 

 Relevance of Content City as Our Campus magnifies the relevance of the learning to students’ lives by exploring the content within authentic settings and problems. Students can see how the content connects to real places and real people, often sparking new ideas and excitement about the possibilities for how it can be used.   Mastery with a Deeper Meaning According to teachers, City as Our Campus seems to result in students attaining a mastery and deeper meaning from the learning experience. Many teachers report that students gain a different perspective on the knowledge and have a greater appreciation for it and its application.  

   

 

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Teacher Benefits City as Our Campus also offers unique advantages for teachers that are not easily attainable through other pedagogical approaches and professional development experiences.  

 Adds Joy and Excitement Teachers reported that City as Our Campus makes teaching and learning enjoyable and exciting as they often design experiences around topics or issues that both students and teachers find interesting and relevant. This brings an energy and enthusiasm to learning that increases engagement and depth.   Extends Resource Pool City as Our Campus enables teachers to work with external partners that are 

often experts in their field. Teachers report learning disciplinary content and process skills from the partners alongside the students, which broadens and deepens their own knowledge based for future implementations of the project. External partners also provide teachers with greater access to tools, materials, equipment, and other resources that would otherwise not be available.  

 School Benefits The benefits of City as Our Campus extend beyond student learning and teacher support and impact other functions within the school, such as enrollment, advancement, and marketing, as well as supporting the Mission, credo, and core goals of the school.  Supporting Credo Winchester Thurston’s founding credo, “Think also of the comfort and the rights of others” is directly linked to the work that students are doing as they study and address the issues impacting their community. This foundation helps to reinforce the value of community-based learning and supports it as a strong identifier for the school.  

 Provides Differentiation  Prior to City as Our Campus, Winchester Thurston did not have a strong identifier in the Pittsburgh community. Furthermore, the campus is landlocked in a dense residential neighborhood with small facilities and limited room for growth. By pursuing community-based learning, the school was able to change the conversation about their location while increasing the school’s desirability and uniqueness among the local independent schools. Some internal metrics of success could be indirectly 

linked to the adoption of City as Our Campus: Since 2002, the school’s endowment has nearly tripled including a separate endowment and endowed chair position for City as Our Campus; additionally, enrollment has consistently increased, growing from 642 students in 2010 to 703 students in 2018.    

 

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Challenges and Tensions   This study discovered tensions that are present when designing, implementing, and sustaining community-based learning experiences. The tensions reflect trade-offs that are being made within and across experiences. While there is likely no solution to these tensions, being aware of and intentional in choices about the trade-offs can reduce the likelihood that these become challenges or weaknesses of a program.   Depth vs. Breadth As always, time is a significant concern for faculty and schools. Community-based learning requires additional time in planning and implementing the experiences. With the increased time demands that many intensive City as Our Campus experiences require in order to attain the level of depth for exploration, a teacher must often reduce or modify the breadth of overall coverage in the course.   

Activity: What activities are currently happening at your school that could be modified to include community-based learning? 

  

  

 Desired Outcomes vs. Validated Assessment  Within City as Our Campus, many of the desired outcomes are difficult to systematically measure, and traditional forms of assessment may not accurately represent the desired outcome. Foregrounding easily measurable outcomes may shift focus away from many of the powerful outcomes that teachers and students find so engaging and efficacious.   

Activity: What ideas do you have to assess community-based learning? 

  

  

 Responsive Content vs. Prescribed Content Much of the advantage of experiential, community-based, and project-based learning is that it is authentic and often unpredictable. This quality requires a level of comfort with often less specified and controlled content goals. This can be in tension with teaching norms that promote highly specific and measurable content goals.    

Activity: What is needed for your school to make this shift? 

  

 

 

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The City as Your Campus   The first phase of this research project was intended to document and understand the City as Our Campus model and to develop a toolkit for other schools working to create their own community-based programs.  

Consider these next steps as you prepare to create or refine your own community-based learning initiative.   

3 Potential Teachers to Engage in Community-Based Learning: 

1.  

2.  

3.  

2 Existing or Potential Community Partners: 

1.  

2.  

1 Action Item to Pursue at My School: 

1.

 

 

   

 

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Next Steps   Winchester Thurston School will continue their partnership with the Learning for Evaluation group of the Learning Research and Development Center at University of Pittsburgh during the 2018-2019 academic year. The second phase of this study will focus on the following questions: 

1. What is the perceived impact of City as Our Campus on student learning, development, and behaviors? 

2. How do stakeholder groups understand and to what extent do they value the City as Our Campus experiences for Winchester Thurston students?  

 

Learn More   To view the full report for Phase 1 of this project and to learn more about additional research efforts, please contact Winchester Thurston School at colearn@winchesterthurston.org.  

Winchester Thurston School offers visit days, consulting, and professional development services to other schools. Please contact Adam Nye, Assistant Head for Educational Strategy, at nyea@winchesterthurston.org to learn more.  

 

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