Harvest Collegiate HS’s teachers have their “offices” in a sun-drenched room they call Harvest Central, where desks face each other in long rows. They are piled with laptops, vitamin bottles and, on a recent visit, astronomical models and books on Greek art and battlefield ethics. In the afternoons, students are welcome to join them.
It is a visitor’s first hint that this small high school near Union Square in Manhattan is not a traditional school.
Harvest will gain more freedom to veer from tradition this year as one of the city’s first PROSE schools. PROSE — Progressive Redesign Opportunity Schools for Excellence — is a provision of the new UFT contract that permits collaborative faculties to redesign aspects of their schools, “even if this means modifying certain existing regulations and work rules,” the guidelines say. Changes must be voted on and approved by a minimum of 65 percent of the UFT-represented staff.
Teacher-led school
Harvest was founded in 2012 by three teachers, a social worker and a principal, from two city high schools. They shared a vision of teacher leadership — in classrooms and in important school decisions such as hiring and scheduling.
As a member of the New York Performance Standards Consortium, the school has an exemption from some Regents tests. One of its founding principles is collective decisions on hiring. The principal gets a vote but not a veto. They also used a School-Based Option to rearrange the schedule so that most teachers can participate in common professional development a day a week.
Using the newfound freedom that PROSE can provide, this year’s plan is to increase teacher leadership positions, create more common planning time and conduct a grand experiment in peer evaluation.
PROSE is not for every school, says Stephen Lazar, a social studies teacher and one of Harvest’s founders, “but for us as a new school it couldn’t have come at a more perfect time.”
Principal Kate Burch calls PROSE “extremely important to the strengthening of our school.”
Confident enough to experiment
The staff at Harvest is composed mainly of experienced educators. They reject a Regents-focused curriculum. “Nothing will give me greater joy than when the current Regents history exams end,” Lazar says.
And they are confident enough to experiment. “Teachers know what good teaching is, and we’re able to talk with each other in more depth than the principal can,” adds math teacher John McCrann, the school’s chapter leader.
Lazar and an English language arts teacher co-teach a humanities unit that includes persuasive writing and history. McCrann co-teaches 9th-grade “urban ecology” with a science teacher.
“We’re saying, ‘Give people control of what they’re doing,’” says McCrann. “We’re taking on the roles traditionally given to the people above us.”
Under PROSE, the school will add two more teacher leader positions this year: Master teacher Dave Sherrin is charged with teaching teachers and Professional Learning Community Organizer Scott Storm will help implement the new evaluations.
They join existing teacher leader Lazar, a data whiz who is the school’s dean of academic progress, and a second dean who is overseeing a restorative-justice approach to student discipline.
The school has also used PROSE to create time for a four-hour staff meeting one Friday a month, when students are dismissed early.
In October, Harvest launched “Option PROSE,” where teachers select their own goals as part of their evaluation plans and can informally observe and evaluate each other’s classrooms, among other changes. At Harvest, the observer and teacher decide what to measure — Storm gave the example of checking for inclusiveness using a classroom “equity audit” tool.
On a recent October morning, Laura Mourino was teaching a geometry lesson at Harvest. She guided a room full of mostly struggling students toward understanding the relative length of lines in a triangle while simultaneously managing some problem behaviors. Despite their restless energy and puzzlement, her students were eagerly discovering the triangle inequality theorem she hoped they would discover.
Mourino came to Harvest from a large high school that the city shut down. When she interviewed at Harvest, she was sold. “I felt I was going to be allowed to teach the way I wanted to teach,” she says.
Mourino had done “instructional rounds” in her former school and sees the new evaluation protocol as a next step. “Now I’m excited,” she says. “We are doing true peer observation — put your money where your mouth is.”
It will work, she predicts, because no one at the school is afraid to speak their mind. “We are daring, we are revolutionary. And we are all OK with saying no.”
Co-founder Steve Lazar (front, center, with glasses) joins educators at a monthly staff meeting at Harvest.
