Chris Carpenter is in his eleventh year as a civics and economics teacher at Clintondale High School in Clinton Township, a small city outside of Detroit. When Carpenter began at Clintondale failure rates were high and getting higher.
A full 75 percent of Clintondale’s majority-minority student population qualifies for federally funded free and reduced meals, and Clintondale principal Greg Green says that many of his students have home environments that aren’t conducive to academic success. The kids in Carpenter’s classes had low hopes and expectations for their schooling, and it was hard to get the kids to pay attention in class – which, in a way, made sense.
“If they know they’re not going to pass [the class], why pay attention?” Carpenter says. “What we were doing when I started there wasn’t working.”
Yet what they were doing would be recognized most readily as 20th century teaching: A teacher stands at the front of the room and gives a lecture; the students take notes on the lecture and are expected to complete an assignment out of a textbook for the night’s homework. It is a tried and true method so conventional as to seemingly preclude the possibility of another method.
But it wasn’t working at Clintondale. Kids weren’t paying attention to the lectures, weren’t doing their homework at home and weren’t passing their classes.
Something needed to change, and it did. And before long, Clintondale became a national success story and a model for a new way of teaching students.
Turning to Technology
Clintondale High School principal Greg Green decided to turn towards technology as a
