The U School: Innovation, Competency Portfolios, and Change
I work at a school that was formed 11 years ago with a goal to “reimagine public education.” We were part of the short-lived “Innovation Network” within the Philadelphia School District, which afforded our staff some flexibility to implement research based alternative strategies for meeting district and state requirements. At the U School we intend for learning goals to be organized within portfolios of “competencies" – which we define as the knowledge and skills learners must successfully apply to solve real world problems. Students are meant to complete a specific set of competencies in each class or subject, before progressing to the next level. Each competency is graded on a set of continua, which break down each broad skill (i.e competency) into a progression of development levels, showing what growth looks like from beginner to advanced.6 This way of conceiving of learning allows each teacher to design a portfolio of specific competencies and provide opportunities for students to demonstrate this learning throughout the year.
I share this background to explain the rationale for how my program and this unit will be structured. This unit will be integral to creating several new portfolios in two new interdisciplinary courses that I will be teaching next year.
I was hired in 2020 as an Agriculture, Food & Natural Resources Career and Technical Education (CTE) teacher, to develop a one-year intensive CTE program which most of our U School students join in their senior year. Our school took on this program to bring the resources of the CTE division into an under-resourced building. Since then, we have leveraged district funding and outside grants to create a dynamic learning environment: a large classroom with a food lab and urban agriculture materials, an extensive food and native flower farm in our school parking lot, and a student-run food resource room housed in the former main office that now serves as a food pantry and Little Free Library. We purchased a shipping container to securely store garden supplies on top of which students and staff built a green roof to capture rainwater and demonstrate green stormwater infrastructure practices. We outfitted a classroom to become our AFNR carpentry shop, so we can build and repair garden infrastructure, and other sustainable building projects. We can provide more than half of our AFNR students paid internships in green collar and sustainability projects during the school year and offer 35 U school students paid summer service-learning jobs in our AFNR spaces.
While growing these sorts of opportunities is a part of my job, I have also had the challenge of aligning our AFNR curriculum with our competency framework. Unlike core academic subjects, which are provided with a set of 5-6 competencies, each with 2-4 sub competencies, my CTE program provided a list of close to 200 “skills and tasks” that students were meant to cover. These do not align with any of the competencies or continua that our grading system computes.
Over the past five years, I’ve worked to organize these tasks into coherent, interdisciplinary units, often drawing from resources I developed through the Teachers Institute of Philadelphia and the Yale National Initiative. These units have helped consolidate CTE tasks into focused themes such as environmental justice, urban agriculture, food systems, food security, and sustainability. I explored Educators for Sustainability (EfS) competency benchmarks and standards to use within our AFNR competency set. I started to see the AFNR program as a way to offer high school seniors the opportunity to do real interdisciplinary work aligned with their interests and post-secondary plans.
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