Lindsay (CA) High School will bring their powerful story of transformation to the 2018 Showcase: Redesigning for Student Success. Lindsay Unified School District serves approximately 4,500 students each day. Located in a rural, migrant farming community, Lindsay High School (LHS) serves a high need population - of the primarily Hispanic population, 100% of students qualify for free or reduced lunch and 36% of students are English Learners. In addition to the high number of homeless and foster children in the district, the school has the highest migrant rate in the county.

In 2007 the district acknowledged that they were not serving students to the highest potential with the traditional school model and launched a "strategic redesign" that continues to guide the work that the district does today. For LHS, the strategic redesign has yielded a transformational learning model that is highly personalized, and competency-based. Teachers are now learning facilitators and students are learners. Each learner has a personalized learning plan and an individualized pacing matrix for each course that they take. This allows all LHS students to "learn in their way, and in their time."

Along this transformational path, educators throughout the district had to confront traditional mindsets and practices in order to implement these personalized practices. For example, one of the first pieces of work that the district tackled was grading. LHS now separates behavior, homework, and attendance from grading and proficiency when assessing progress. Learners continue to work on the learning targets - which are mapped out in the new K12 curriculum - until they achieve proficiency. Learning facilitators support students through a variety of flexible groupings each day and students also engage in peer to peer support, as well as self-reflection, on a regular basis. These changes in instructional practices and grading policies have yielded a new learner-led culture which includes articulated lifelong learning standards that are regularly assessed for both students and educators.

All of this hard work has earned the district a lot of recognition. In 2012 the district received a $10 million Race to the Top award to continue completing work toward their performance based system. In 2015, they were awarded support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to build the California Consortium for Development and Dissemination of Personalized Education. In 2016, the Chan/Zuckerberg Initiative partnered with the district to create a program enabling the district to coach and offer support to other districts seeking to transition to competency-based models. And, in 2017, the district was awarded a $28 million T eacher and School Leader grant from the US Department of Education's Office of Innovation and Improvement to further support Lindsay educators.

The presenters from LHS will share their continuing story of transformation at the 2018 Showcase. This story is ongoing as LHS works to implement "learning colleges." Learning colleges will serve to better prepare students for post-secondary learning. Within the learning colleges, small cohorts of learners will be grouped with an interdisciplinary teacher team to facilitate more project-based, seminar style learning. With graduation rates and college matriculation and persistence rates on the rise, LHS educators hope that the learning colleges will further enrich the personalized learning model they have developed, and better support their commitment to lifelong learning for all LHS students. 

Check out Beyond Reform: Systemic Shifts Toward Personalized Learning (2017). With a forward by Robert J. Marzano, this book tells LHS's story of transformation and shares a model that can be replicated by schools seeking to implement similar reforms. 

Visit the Lindsay High School website.