The Rockaway College Concept Paper: Design of Rockaway College-Lower and Upper Schools

The Rockaway College component enrolls adolescents and young adults twelve to nineteen years of age within three “Schools”:  The Venture School, The Lower School and The Upper School.  The Venture School holds the outdoor adventure based personal growth intake program for the secondary education of the Lower School providing incoming youngsters individual and collaborative engagement with the natural world as a tool to adapt to the cooperative self-directed school culture upon which the secondary education program rests.  

The Lower School holds the secondary education program enrolling a maximum of one-hundred fifty students.   It would be structured within six cooperative learning labs where adolescents work collaboratively to sharpen individual learning skills, to enhance mindfulness of social-emotional aspects of personality and to competently manage behavioral outcomes while exercising their distinctive ways of acquiring and reporting knowledge and administering through a democratic/consensus process the policy governance of the program and The School.

The Upper School offers an early college program for at least one-hundred fifty young scholars in semester length Socratic seminar courses.  Learning in The Upper School features a peer environment mutually supportive of the life of the mind and of intellectual inquiry free from anti-intellectual peer pressures and an enhancement of intellectual curiosity and cultivation of scholarly passion through focused cooperative academic engagement with the received knowledge coming from written tradition, both Western and Eastern.  Upper School scholars, as well, manage policy of the program and The School through a democratic/consensus process.  Upon graduation from the Upper School young scholars would receive both a high school diploma and an Associate of Arts degree.

(This paper proposes capping enrollment in the programs to the numbers so stated, or just slightly higher, with the exception of the early college.  If demand and funding allow, the early college program should expand as far as it can reasonably go while keeping with the small school’s mission of Rockaway College.  Further, while it is not the intention of this paper to propose a Liberal Arts Bacheloriate Degree program extending the early college to include Bacheloriate completion, if demand, funding and experience warrant, such an extension should be instituted with enrollment expanding, as well, as far as it can reasonably go while keeping with the small school’s mission of Rockaway College.)

The secondary education program of The Lower School would actualize student intellectual curiosity and refinement of learning to learn skills.  The curriculum for the program would be called “Free Academic”.  It is Academic in that the universe of knowledge open to engagement would be that of the learned world. It is Free in that the intellectual curiosity and the natural differences of each youngster would drive engagement with the learned world rather than that of uniform mandated core and elective curricula; in its own way the Lower School program’s course of content study would be as individualized and emergent as that of the Primary School’s content acquisition. 

Inquiry Project Based Learning and Performance Assessment would be the learning/reporting and evaluation structures utilized by students to process through the Lower School to translation of matriculation to the Upper School. Every student would engage the learned world through an inquiry project determined by his own neurological construction, abilities, interests, temperament and communication style.  Inquiry projects would be developed, implemented and evaluated through participation in cooperative learning groups where group members act together to achieve individual project objectives rather than through self-reliant, independent studies.  There are proposed to be six Cooperative Learning Groups inhabiting their own lab spaces and facilitated each by a Learning Specialist:  Science, History, Letters, Arts, Performance and Foreign Language Arts. 

The ideas, the notions, the concepts, of the learned world into which Lower School students would choose to inquire, are called “Themes”.  “Oceans”, “Mountains”, “Deserts”, “Cities”, “Luminescence”, “Alienation”, “Creation Myths”, “Spider Webs”, “Wild Fires”, are examples of themes.  Students would select one theme at any one time on which to concentrate an inquiry project.  They would initiate theme selection for all projects rather than rely on mentor or learning specialist directed theme selection.  Lists of themes made available by Learning specialists would provide students with themes for selection; however, students would be free to create their own if they so choose.

After a student selects a theme, he would need to propose to her mentor an inquiry project exploring the theme. The project proposal in this program would be called the Inquiry Project Plan, or “The Plan”.  The Plan would outline each project by stating its Theme, Scope, Objective, Methods, Final Product and Criteria for Success.  The completed Plan can be aural in the form of an audio tape or a CD or a spoken presentation, or visual in the form of a story board, or written in the form of a series of brief statements or several short paragraphs. 

The Final Product of a student’s project would be left to each student.  He could choose to present an academic paper or a science experiment, or create a drawing, a painting, a sculpture, a video, an audio recording, or stage a one act play, an epic poem, a poetry reading, a musical performance, or write a poem, a piece of music, an essay or a short story, and so on.

Plan development would be undertaken with the cooperative assistance of fellow Lower School students in which ever Cooperative Learning Group, or Groups, a student finds of interest. When The Plan is completed and registered with his mentor, a student rejoins the Cooperative Learning Group appropriate to project content, methods and final product.  The Learning Group works cooperatively to achieve Plan goals.  Portfolios of projects would be kept by each student and by her mentor attesting to the type and the quality of work accomplished.

The following examples demonstrate the manner by which students, themes, Plans, mentors and Cooperative Learning Groups combine.  A new student to the secondary education program finally rests on Luminescence as her theme of interest after observing and working with fellow students in Science, Arts and History Cooperative Learning Groups.  Together with her mentor and with fellow students in the Science Learning Group she develops her Plan.  She aurally submits her completed Plan as a spoken presentation given to her mentor.  She reports the project Scope as marine life and Objective as the identification of three species of marine bioluminescent animals and a description of their habitats.  She also reports the Steps and the Skills required for her to achieve the project Objectives.  Her project Final Product, she says, would be a computer multi-media presentation.  She sets out the Criteria for Success for the project.  As the content and the skills involve scientific knowledge, the student rejoins the Science Learning Group to actualize her project.  Another student mid-way through his residency in the secondary education program also selects Luminescence as his theme as he has been exploring this theme for a while.  He presents his mentor with a completed Plan in the form of several paragraphs after working in the Arts Learning Group. He states the project Scope as still-life photography and the Objective as the exploration of the affects of different light source positions on still-life photographic composition.  His Plan states the Steps and the Skills required for him to achieve the project objective. He states the project’s Final Product as a portfolio series of light studies of three different still-life subjects.  He sets out the Criteria for Success for the project.  As the content and the skills involve art knowledge, this student rejoins the Art Learning Group to actualize his project. 

Each and every Plan would have Criteria for Project Success based on performance assessment methods. Performance assessment rubrics would consist of qualitative propositions describing standards against which student work could be judged; scoring is intended not to be part of any rubric.  All rubrics are meant to give students a self-assessment method of judging the quality of their effort as they work toward fulfilling their criteria for success.  However, a student may request the group within which he/she is working to formally evaluate a project.  But, beyond that, there is intended to be no formal assessment of student work unless either the community as a whole sanctions it or, as indicated, an individual student requests it.

Occasionally there may be a need felt by students or observed by the learning specialist for direct instruction of project skills or of assessment methods or of common subject content.  In this case a student, a group of students or the learning specialist would call a learning group seminar to fill the need.  All learning group seminars would be conducted using Cooperative Learning methods.

Students when not acquiring additional project skills or common subject content or evaluating project efforts or working with mentors would work on their projects independently or cooperatively depending on the youngsters’ inclinations and the kinds of tasks to be done. However, an expectant behavior of the cooperative norm is that each youngster is to look for opportunities to help fellow students as well as to be open to help when needed. 

The Lower School, like The Venture School, would combine its staff and students into a formal general school community governance structure while each Cooperative Learning Group would combine its learning specialist with whoever selects to be associated with the individual Cooperative Learning Group to form an informal Group governance.

The General Lower School Community would meet once weekly to propose and resolve Lower School-wide issues including certain budgeting issues and learning material needs.  School-wide policy on projects, respecting types, numbers for each student during the school year, rating or ranking systems and on individual progress benchmarks would be a General Lower School Community governance issue needing to be resolved by the inaugural community, reviewed, maintained and, if necessary revised by the Rockaway College General Schools Community as it establishes itself with the institution of The Lower School.  The criteria for translation of matriculation into the Upper School and what would constitute successful demonstration of the criteria would also be a Lower School community governance issue on inception of the Lower School but would have to be then maintained and/or modified by the Rockaway College General Schools Community once it is constituted and by the General College Community when expansion of the Upper School program is being established. 

While the General College Community would meet twice every month, the General Lower School Community would meet weekly.  But, each Cooperative Learning Group would have their Morning Meetings each morning to organize their school day and to settle any governance issue pertinent to their immediate Group. Cooperative Learning Group community issues would include such as performance assessment components and any other issue specific to the benefit of the individual Learning Group and its students. 

Students would pass through and out of the Lower School to the Upper School at their own pace and in their own time.

The constitution of the early college program of the Upper School would center itself within a traditional college structure of simultaneous and consecutive course study where the configuration of course sessions in clock hours and in weekly occurrence would be open to Upper School community decision.   This would be resolved by the inaugural community and would be maintained, reviewed or revised by subsequent Upper School communities. 

The Upper School would also use a thematic, inquiry curriculum.  It is called The Great Question Curriculum, an integrated interdisciplinary contemporary Great Books curriculum using the Great Books as sources from which Great Questions would be derived and the resources from which students would turn to answer these questions.  Thus, each semester small groups of interested young scholars would enroll in courses exploring a specific Great Question.  Through the shared inquiry of Socratic seminars-and all courses would be Socratically structured-these young adults would collaboratively explore Great Questions.  These inquiries can be facilitated by faculty or by the students themselves.   The course of study in the Upper School would be wholly the choice of individual students.  But, if students choose to continue with formal study and to transfer to a Bacheloriate program after graduating from the early college, the Upper School curriculum can be structured to satisfy general university core requirements. 

Upper School faculty representing Science, History, Arts, Letters, Communication and Foreign Language Arts would integrate their disciplines and would through consensus with the initial and subsequent groups of Upper School students develop the generations of interdisciplinary Great Questions.  Integrated interdisciplinary shared inquiry Socratic seminar development would remain an Upper School governance issue for the existence of the College. 

An example of a Great Question might be:  “How did the eighteenth century European belief against Superstition and Fanaticism affect the construction of the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment?”  This Great Question would describe and analyze the development, meaning and effects of the European Enlightenment belief in Rational Religion and in the dangers of Superstition and Fanaticism on the framing of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause.

Other Great Questions might be:

-Does Dark Matter Matter?

-Can Your Render Unto Caesar When Caesar is Wrong?

-How Is The Child Mother To The Woman?

-Is Reality Really Real?

-Can Spacetime Truly Bend?

-Who Owns?:  The Moral Effects of Private Property

-Beyond legal and political equality in a just society there is the personal exercise of virtue.  What constitutes virtue and how does one live a virtuous life within a “fallen” society?

The Upper School program would form its General Upper School Community for policy governance organizing itself to settle all policy governance issues using The Upper School Meeting held weekly; there would be no Morning Meetings. Policy on criteria and demonstration of criteria for successful seminar completion and on seminar class attendance would be decided by the inaugural community, maintained, reviewed and if necessary revised by subsequent Upper School communities as well as policy concerning the establishment of assessments, grading and ranking schemes. The Upper School community would consider certain budgeting issues as well.  But, the gravest decisions to be made by the Upper School community aside from course curriculum, Great Question decisions, is on the criteria for graduation and the granting of diplomas and degrees and what would constitute successful demonstration of the criteria. 

While it is the intent of this paper to grant a measure of autonomy to the Upper School by relieving it of most of its Rockaway College General Schools Community obligations, it intends to insist on it being a full participant in the institution-wide General College Community.  Additionally, under Upper School expansion there might be a need to alter community governance, but if community governance is changed, it must remain in keeping with decentralized, fully participatory Democratic Education principles and practices.

On mentoring: It is nearly a given that Venture and Lower School students need the supportive service of deep mentoring relationships with those thoroughly versed in the cooperative self-directed academics of the school and in the unique social-emotional and cognitive styles of the school’s population to assist them in maneuvering through the channels of the academy and to help them help themselves to work through their natural inclinations and individual differences to achieve schooling success.  But, the intended population of the Rockaway College component as much requires such support as they move through the Upper School as well.  Therefore, each student in the Lower and the Upper Schools, as well as in the Venture School, would be required to be mentored for as long as he or she is in residency. The Venture Crew Advisors would be tasked to mentor Venture School students for the time the youngsters are in the Venture School.  The Lower School Learning Specialists would be tasked to mentor Lower School students for the time these adolescents are in The Lower School.  The Upper School faculty would be tasked to mentor to the Upper School scholars for the time these young adults are in The Upper School.