Interview With Cynthia McCallister, Ed.D.

Interested in learning what "Learning Cultures" and "Unison Reading" are about?
The following comments are based on a January 15th, 2013 interview with Cynthia McCallister, Ed.D.

How did you get involved with secondary school education?

A couple things happened simultaneously. While working at the Jacob Riis School as a consultant in 2007-2011, where I was a coach and helped the teachers implement practices that would come to be known collectively as Learning Cultures, we held presentations and school tours. Jacob Riis is a Pre-k through 8^th grade school. 

But high school people started coming to the presentations and showed a lot of interest. 

They saw applications for high school classrooms. Julie (Principal Nariman) was one of them. She came to visit in the Spring of 2011. The following summer, when she was preparing to open your school, she joined a team of teachers and attended a Unison Reading conference in Indiana. Urban Assembly, a NYC school support network, also became interested. They support high schools and middle schools. There are currently eight Urban Assembly schools implementing Learning Cultures.

How would you explain and describe "Learning Cultures" to an unfamiliar audience?

It is a way of organizing the classroom so that students have a lot of autonomy and freedom to make choices to do things and engage in curriculum activities that align with learning standards. A big part of the Learning Cultures model is the assignment of student responsibility.  

One of the consistent research findings in research in the psychology of motivation is that the more autonomy one has in doing a particular task, the more one tends to be motivated in the activity. This lesson from psychology is applied to all facets of the Learning Cultures model. At every opportunity, students are provided as much autonomy as possible to reach learning goals. With so much autonomy, students have plenty of opportunity to develop a sense of responsibility for doing things that help them accomplish goals toward their own learning objectives. These factors—autonomy and responsibility—impact learning not only by helping students reach content learning objectives, but also in helping them develop dispositions that are vitally important to learning and academic development.

What is the significance of Cooperative Unison Reading? [Cynthia is the originator of UR]

Cooperative Unison Reading creates a shared experience so that everyone can participate in reading the same text at the same time. The phenomenon of a shared experience is a venue for shared regulation where students can attend to what others in the group are attending to. This phenomenon, known as “joint attention,” is the engine of social understanding. 

In Cooperative Unison Reading we maximize the power of joint attention by holding students accountable to following into one another’s comments and actions to seek higher understanding. By attending to the smart things that others do when they read, students have opportunities to take and apply smart strategies to their independent reading. Through Cooperative Unison Reading, students have opportunities not only to read and access information about content presented in texts, they also have opportunities to learn to reason cooperatively with others, a skill that will serve them in all facets of social life inside and outside of school.

Another thing that makes it unique is that kids have a lot of choice and autonomy within the Cooperative Unison Reading program. Students have opportunities to select texts that they want to read, as opposed to reading texts assigned by teachers. They also have opportunities to sign up to be in groups of their choice, as opposed to being assigned reading groups based on reading ability or reading level. Students love this aspect of the program.  

Cooperative Unison Reading is an example of how principals of autonomy and student responsibility operate within the Learning Cultures model. I’d say that applications of these principles to educational practice are few and far between, and that’s another factor that makes Cooperative Unison Reading unique.

Would Learning Cultures formats be applicable in schools with extreme attendance and behavior issues? Why or why not?

Yes. When kids like the way they feel in school and enjoy the activities school has to offer, they're more inclined to want to be in school and attend more consistently. When kids feel good about themselves and feel pride when others recognize their competence, that promotes positive behavior. Learning Cultures practices are designed to nurture every students sense of self-competence and to help students develop a sense of connectedness and relatedness to their classmates. The rules of the formats forbid treatment that is not promotive. So the practices help promote a positive classroom climate. All these factors help boost attendance and reduce discipline problems.

What are 3 things that sets our school apart from other high schools in New York City?

One thing is Julie's leadership is so strong. She has such a clear vision for what she wants the school to become. Learning Cultures is a pretty revolutionary, out of the box model. And by embracing it in such a dedicated and unshakable way, I think she’s demonstrated that she possesses a deep understanding of how people learn and a strong sense of courage and confidence to implement a program that diverges from the status quo. She has also demonstrated impressive talent in hiring and developing a talented cadre of faculty to implement the Learning Cultures program. Across the board, my sense is that the faculty is strong, open-minded and committed.

The kids make the place so special. They're from all over the globe. Really incredible, wonderful things happen with people from a breadth of different cultures and walks of life come together and have opportunities to share ideas. This makes your school a really fun place to spend time. The kids are becoming a product of the curriculum and a place that is rigorous academically. They set the bar high and have developed their own sense of ambition and commitment. That’s really rewarding to see. 

What is 1 major thing that sets our school apart from other high schools nationwide?

It's a place where kids experience a level of autonomy and independence that doesn't really happen anywhere else that I know of. There are free schools where students themselves decide what they want to learn and have freedom to do as they wish. But Learning Cultures does not permit that kind of freedom. Learning Cultures establishes explicit, high standards for students that are not negotiable. But it provides time, space, resources, support, autonomy and responsibility so that students can make their own progress toward meeting expectations. This combination of autonomy combined with high standards is rare.

Also, one thing about your school that unique and sets it apart is coherence. There is coherence across all classrooms in relation to the autonomy piece that I just spoke about. You might find individual teachers who successfully establish high standards and afford students autonomy as a means to reach them, but these cases are isolated. Rarely, if ever, has the combination been brought to scale school wide. If it can be sustained for any length of time here at HSLI, it will be quite an accomplishment!

What predictions would you make for where our students will be in five years? Ten?

On the one hand, we're looking into a future that is now more unpredictable and uncertain than it's been for any generation before. What HSLI students are learning now about how to be independent, purposeful and resourceful, how to make decisions, how to move successfully into new contexts, how to learn without being spoon fed information, these are abilities that will serve your students well in a future that is uncertain.

Many people don’t have opportunities to learn these lessons until well after leaving high school or even after college. For many of us, these were life lessons that we didn’t have a chance to learn in school.

A lot of kids mistake being spoon-fed information for good teaching. But while a lock-step curriculum might seem comforting, students at your school are being forced to be independent in ways that will serve them well, and they're making a lot of decisions for how to meet their learning objectives. I think that they're learning the kind of independence necessary for college, technical, or professional school. They are learning how important it is to learn from others and to know how to cooperate. These are abilities that are increasingly valued in the job market. Yet students are deprived of opportunities to learn them in the typical American high school. Your school is unique. So, I suspect that that will give an edge that many freshmen do not have when they go to college.