Take a tour of the new Workshop School, and it is abundantly clear this is not the typical urban bastion
of the three Rs.
The classrooms have no rows of desks. Quizzes are anathema. And forget about 47-minute periods of algebra or five-paragraph assignments on Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Rather, students come to this unusual West Philadelphia high school to do hands-on work and tackle real-world problems — the “secret sauce,” says its co-founder and Principal Simon Hauger, ’93 ’04.
“It is groundbreaking,” says Sarah Ulrich, director of the School of Education’s Teacher Education program and an associate clinical professor of education.
Workshop, she says, is the only primarily project-based school in Philadelphia and one of the few nationwide. “It can give classroom teachers a sense of possibilities, however small you begin,” she says.
The traditional curriculum is out. Expect to get dirty, one teacher tells new students. And to fail — and learn from it.
In a typical classroom, students might write a computer program to assess energy usage. Or create an eco-fashion line of handbags. Or design a prototype for modular housing to help storm-torn countries such as Haiti. In fact, those are all projects completed over the past couple of years during a pilot phase.
“Unfortunately, school is not as simple as teaching kids the Pythagorean Theorem,” says Hauger, 43, who earned a bachelor’s in electrical engineering from Drexel in 1993 and then a master’s in instruction and a principal certification from Drexel’s School of Education in 2004. “If it was, school would be working really well and we wouldn’t need a different approach.”
A system in disrepair
Unfortunately, most urban schools are not working very well. In Philadelphia, 39 percent of public school pupils do not graduate on time. Half of the city’s students are not proficient in math and 55 percent are not proficient in reading, according to Pennsylvania System of School Assessment scores.
Hauger contends that those dismal numbers could turn around with a project-based approach to education. His like-minded partners are Matthew Riggan, executive director of the school’s nonprofit foundation; and Michael Clapper, an adjunct education professor at Drexel and a Workshop teacher. All three met at West Philadelphia High School, where they worked and became friends. In 2002, while sharing Chinese food, they began to kick around ideas for a school focused on hands-on solutions to practical problems.
“A workshop is a place, in our minds, where ideas percolate and you experiment and try different things,” the sanguine Hauger says. “It’s this idea of tinkering, but also you’re doing real stuff. You don’t just sit and theorize in a workshop.”
They put their premise to the test in a two-year pilot project called the Sustainability Workshop. A group of seniors spent the school day solving concerns important to them, questions such as: How do you encourage folks to switch to LED lights? How can you reduce the amount of clothing in the waste stream?
Instead of a term paper, they created thick business plans.
The budding entrepreneurs were accustomed to struggling in their traditional high schools. Here, they flourished, Hauger says, and in the process, mastered English, math and science skills.
“The amount of academic work is intense,” he says. He points with pride at graduates who are enrolled in college or in good jobs.
With what they learned from the pilot, they opened Workshop School in a building 17 blocks west from Drexel on South Hanson Street with 70 ninth-graders as well as 25 upperclassmen. The school just completed its first full year of operation.
It is one of the most unusual models of education among the district’s institutions.
Philadelphia Schools Superintendent William R. Hite Jr. would like to see more education delivered in its experiential style. “This is more like what high school should look like than the traditional structures that control time, control pace, control content,” he says. “The fact that these kids get to innovate, get to think more entrepreneurial, get to build real-world skills makes this extremely important, not as an exception but as something more students should have access to.”
As the financially strapped district struggles to get additional funds and has cut positions and services, some have criticized its decision to invest in a new high school. Hite, however, views Workshop as exactly the type of model an embattled district needs to turn the corner.
“Why not now?” he says. “For me, that’s a no brainer.”
The Philadelphia School Partnership, a citizen-organized nonprofit that raises private funds to expand seats at promising schools, gave Workshop $1.5 million over three years.
Hite is especially heartened that the school is not a magnet or charter but open to any student. Workshop is a chance to experiment from within the district, he says.
“People learn in different ways,” he says. “You have to have different educational opportunities for them.”
From Cars to careers
At a festive September open house, Hauger wears his trademark polo shirt and welcomes new students and their families for tours. A “beliefs” banner hanging from the ceiling begins, “We believe that all learners (students and teachers) have insight, creativity and something important to offer.”
Nearby, two cars attract attention. One is a flashy, orange hybrid; the other, which runs entirely on battery power, has its hood propped open to expose its innards. Both cars were entered in the $10 million Automotive X Prize green racing competition. Hauger’s students, the only high school team out of 111 worldwide, bested top engineering universities to make the final rounds. The feat earned the students an invitation in 2010 to the White House, where President Obama offered kudos. Earlier Hauger students won top honors at the American Tour de Sol five-day road rally for solar-powered vehicles.
“My son likes to draw, tinker with computers and Xbox game systems,” says West Philadelphia parent Moab Bey Sr. as he looks over the vehicles. “I want something good for my son. He can get skills here, a trade.”
His son, Moab Bey Jr., 15, says he is eager to build his own car. “I can’t wait to see what it will look like,” he says.
Stefon Gonzalez, an alumnus of the sustainability workshop, participated in the X Prize contest and now works for SEPTA as a first-class mechanic. In high school, he remembers asking an algebra teacher about the day-to-day usefulness of the subject. “She didn’t have an answer,” he says. During the Sustainability Workshop pilot program, he says, he found a “more realistic” curriculum.
Another alum of the pilot program, Vivian Chen, is a sophomore at the University of the Sciences, where she studies pharmacy. At Sustainability, where she pursued the LED light project, she says she used what she learned.
“It was more applicable,” she says. “It was something that really mattered.”
“Unfortunately, school is not as simple as teaching kids the Pythagorean Theorem…
If it was, school would be working really well and we wouldn’t need a different approach.”
Shifting gear
Growing up in West Philadelphia, Hauger attended the traditional Lamberton High School in Overbrook. A counselor noted his ability in math and science (“I like math because you could find the right answer,” Hauger says) and pointed him toward engineering. During his Drexel co-op at General Electric, though, Hauger had an epiphany; he couldn’t see himself there 20 years later. He also had embraced his Christian faith and wanted to work with people and do good, he says. He wanted to teach.
“He’s one of those doers,” says Larry Keiser, director of special projects and certification officer in the School of Education who
also was Hauger’s adviser. “It’s not a matter of whether we can do it, but how.”
Hauger’s first teaching job in 1994 was at a magnet school. But the next year, he was placed at West Philadelphia High to teach math to students in the automotive program. It would prove “providential,” he says.
His initial disappointment — “In my mind, I wanted to work with college-bound kids,” he says — quickly turned to admiration for his shop teacher colleagues. “It really changed my definition of smart,” he says, “and how to teach.”
Hauger started an after-school car-building program, and he — and more important, his students — quickly attracted attention for successes at science fairs and race competitions.
“He believes in people and in kids and the possibility and potential all the way through,” says Clapper, a Workshop teacher.
Former dean of the School of Education William Lynch says that when faculty members learned of Hauger’s involvement with Workshop, they were not surprised, but they were abundantly proud.
“The faculty and I saw something special in Simon,” Lynch says. “We knew it was only a matter of time before he set out to change the world. The way in which he is attempting to do that has inspired us all.”
Keiser, Hauger’s former adviser, describes Workshop’s philosophy as “a shift in what schooling is all about. Are you preparing kids for life, for work, for good citizenship? Or are you just training them in rote memorization of facts, which they can get from the Internet?”
Alternate ROUTE
In its opening weeks, Workshop was clearly striving for the former. Students wrote telenovelas in Spanish and acted them out, they
competed in designing bridges out of balsa and Popsicle sticks, and they used Google docs to construct an autobiography and reflect on their worldviews.
Of course, Workshop’s ultimate success hinges on students performing well on assessments — those state assessment tests loom, after all — and as Hauger himself says: “This approach is not for everybody.”
But for the many other students who have failed in traditional classrooms, Workshop, by all accounts, offers a path to success. Ann Cohen, who chairs the board for the school’s nonprofit arm, is a fan and fundraiser for Hauger’s many projects, dating back to his science fair days.
“The secret that Simon has found — and I don’t know how big of a secret it is — is that if you give kids problems that are important and relevant and timely,” she says, “and allow them to take a look at those problems and use their natural intelligence, curiosity and creativity, they can do remarkable stuff. It doesn’t matter what your SAT score is or whether you know how to parse a sentence.”