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CAPSTONE
INITIATIVE
Rutland Region Education Alliance
Rutland, Vermont
BRIEF DESCRIPTION
OF PRACTICE
The Capstone Initiative is a means for students to integrate learning from many different
sources—school, personal, family and community. The initiative provides students
with the opportunity to establish a sound work ethic, high academic achievement,
effective social skills, good citizenship and a sense of altruism that leads to informed
decision making and responsible action.
The Capstone Initiative has four components:
Personal
Development Collection (Portfolio)
The PDC is a portfolio collection that comprehensively presents a student’s products,
performance and reflections, and show his/her accomplishments of Vermont’s Vital
Results. Creation of the PDC is a process as well as a product. The student reviews
the PDC annually at a conference with teacher, parents and peers.
Work-Based Learning Experiences
Work-based learning gives students a scheduled and planned opportunity to use
some of what they know in a job setting. It allows students to meet academic standards
in a hands-on, out-of-school environment. Students go into the workplace with specific
learning goals in mind. They engage in activities such as job visits, job shadowing,
apprenticeships, student entrepreneurship, internships, supported employment, mentor
relationships or cooperative employment. These may include unpaid work experiences,
paid work experiences, short or long term experiences. The purpose of multiple work-based
learning experiences is to give students many opportunities during their school years
to demonstrate their own accomplishment of Vermont's Vital Results standards.
Community Service Learning Experiences
Community service learning allows students to use their school and personal knowledge
and skills to address actual human or environmental needs in their communities. It
is learning through problem solving in a deliberate variety of settings, including
their families, school and the greater community outside of school. The services
students provide meet a genuine need, rather than one created for the learning situation.
When students are volunteering, they work to develop a mutually beneficial relationship
with those they are serving. Through these experiences, students gain a sense of
empowerment, because they learn that they can make a difference. They gain insights
into themselves and others that allow them to fulfill both the letter and the spirit
of Vermont's Vital Results standards. Students participate in service learning activities
repeatedly throughout their primary, intermediate, middle and high school years.
Personal Performance Projects
A PPP is an investigation designed and carried out by individual students in
a combination of school, community and research settings. Student share their learning
in some original way with a jury of peers, mentors experts and family, in a public
performance of expressive presentation. Students undertake a PPP each year, pre-K-through
12, with increasing independence in all phases of the work, form top selection to
presentation format. The student puts some of this work into his/her Personal Development
Collection, demonstrating Vital Results Standards in progress or met.
Teacher and
student guidelines for the project are drawn from the Vermont Framework’s Learning
Opportunities, from best practice research and from local pilot projects. Ideally,
students will participate in all four components of the Capstone Initiative each
year, pre-K through 12. These Capstone experiences and assessments allow students
to draw their learning together in complex, original, applied ways and to demonstrate
that learning publicly.
Some schools may require some or all elements of Capstone for all students. Many
schools have integrated the components through the action planning. Somce schools
are building to an integrated Capstone initiative, by starting with one component
and add as experience and capacity allow. There may also be direct and indirectly
connection between fulfillment of Capstone elements and graduation from high school.
The attraction for schools in implementing Capstone is that it integrates practices
the school must implement to satisfy existing mandates from the state and demands
from the community for improved learning. (For example, Goals 2000, State mandates,
STW, special ed requirements, looping and other scheduling concepts, grade to grade
reporting, regional plans, etc. ) Capstone brings these elements together into one
"system." For example, schools and educators are able to see HOW to use
the Vermont Framework of Standards and Learning Opportunities in a way that is truly
meaningful for the youth. The concepts re-ignite their passion for teaching and why
they became educators in the first place – to make a difference in the lives of kids.
One of the most important ideas is that these components allow youth to look into
things that are of interest to them and therefore get "turned on to learning."
This motivation was key to Rutland’s success. It was also built by teachers to satisfy
their need to improve learning. The program itself was not mandated.
PLANNING AND IMPLEMENTATION
The Capstone Initiative is part of a larger commitment on the part of the Rutland
region to make education meaningful and to support every child in the region to:
- Show evidence
of students’ continuous advancement in meeting the standards of the Vermont Framework.
- Learn through
community service and through work-based experiences, in standards-based units of
study.
- Show achievement
through benchmark performance tasks that take place both in the classroom and outside
of the school environment
- Show that
students can apply what they learn in school to future learning and work experiences
outside of school.
- Complete a
high school culminating project reflecting the Capstone Guidelines, as a condition
of earning a high school diploma in any high school in Rutland County.
The Capstone
idea evolved from discussions among Rutland Region school superintendents, curriculum
coordinators, business leaders and representatives from higher education, adult education
and classroom teachers. The participants agreed that high school graduates from the
Rutland Region should earn diplomas that reflected a commonly accepted set of skills
and knowledge, while preserving the individuality of the seven high schools in the
area.
The Curriculum Committee of the Rutland Region Education Alliance (RREA, the regional
STW initiative) used STW mini-grants to fund a team that would establish goals and
requirements for all pre-K-12 students. The Capstone Leadership Team first met during
the summer of 1997. There were two representatives from each Rutland Region supervisory
union on the team, including classroom teachers and administrators. A part-time coordinator
for the project was hired. The work of the Leadership Team, which continues today,
has been two-fold: to develop the guidelines for each of the four Capstone components
and to help educators throughout the Region to become familiar with the Capstone
Initiative.
The Leadership Team envisioned a set of "pilots" the first year, with feedback
from participating students and educators shaping the programs offered in subsequent
years. For example, an initial report from one teen at Proctor High School convinced
the Leadership Team to expand the Performance Projects requirement from a few grades
to all students in all grades.
The first training session offered by the Leadership Team was for educators who were
willing to implement standard based units of study which included at least one Capstone
element. Educators (collectively known as the Implementation Team) were acquainted
with the standards and were introduced to each of the four Capstone concepts (work-based
learning, community service learning, Personal Development collection and Performance
projects) and how they interconnect with the standards. Hearing from youth who had
Capstone related experiences excited and energized the educators. With this in mind
and with help from design and standards consultants, units of study were created
from new or existing curriculum and incorporated at least one Capstone element. The
initial implementation led to a wider spread use of Capstone elements. For instance,
one teacher built community service learning and work-based learning into her exiting
mandatory course for seniors. Others have used the work from existing writing and
math portfolios to create the Personal Development Collection for the entire 3rd
grade. The elementary school expanded their existing portfolio program to other grade
levels.
The educators were able to meet a few times during the school year to share their
successes and challenges in implementing their units. As a result of this process
and the work of the Leadership Team, a handbook was written to help schools or individuals
interested in implementing Capstone elements.
EVALUATION/MEASUREMENT
Surveys of educators, School-To-Work data collection and reports at the Rutland Region
Education Alliance’s annual meeting (where students present their work) have been
used as tools to measure outcomes. These outcomes include:
- Number of
youth using personal development collections, having opportunities involving performance
projects, work based and service learning.
- A school or
district wide scope/plan for ensuring Capstone elements are available to all students.
- The number
of educators using standards based units of study.
- The number
of High Schools tying Capstone to graduation
Until more
students have progressed through several grades with Capstone experience, the impact
of the program will be assessed by these process outcomes, rather than by student
performance.
SUSTAINABILITY PLAN
The RREA Board is seeking resources to finance a regional coordinator for Capstone.
In the interim, some provisions have already been made. There are people in each
district that have received training, some schools have included the practice in
their action plans and some components are incorporated into the supervisory union’s
curriculum.
CONNECTIONS TO VERMONT FRAMEWORK OF STANDARDS AND LEARNING OPPORTUNITIES
The Capstone Initiative provides a wide variety of learning opportunities that
directly support the Vermont Framework. Each of the four components is aligned to
the state’s Vital Results Standards. Standards-based units of study directly align
classroom activity with the standards. Detailed alignment documentation is available
from the linked resource The Capstone Initiative of the Rutland Region Education
Alliance: A Manual for Practitioners at http://www.sover.net/~rrea/
CONTACT
For more information please check out the web site http://www.sover.net/~rrea/.
RESOURCES
The following resources (underlined) are available at http://www.sover.net/~rrea/. Links to remaining
resources will be made when the information becomes available.
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