The Little Christian High School That Can    

by Lloyd Den Boer

I’m a teacher educator. For the past ten years I’ve spent countless hours in high schools. I often walk into school buildings that I don’t know, making my way through crowded halls to classrooms where my students are taking their first steps into teaching careers. Nevertheless, on the pleasant September morning when I first visited Calvin Christian High School, I felt anxious. I knew what CCHS was like on paper; I was familiar with the plans. This, however, would be my first chance to see the students and teachers at work. I hoped to find the best and feared, a little, to find something far less.

By the end of my first day at CCHS, I knew that I could relax. I saw that the school was serving its students well.  Later, after more than 50 hours at the school, I felt that I could say a few things about how well it was serving them.

People who are responsible for evaluating the quality of teaching and learning get their eyes trained to watch for certain things. One of them is how the people in a classroom or a school get along with each other. Research has shown that good relationships in schools are important for more than simply making everyone feel comfortable. In fact, high quality learning for all students requires a sense of community. CCHS is outstanding on this indicator. I could see a sense of community among the students, and they insisted that what I was seeing was real. 

Community between students and teachers is there, too. A student told me, “The teachers trust us, and so we—well, except for some silly stuff now and then—we are responsible.” That student captured the core of what I saw, but the full extent goes even further. What I saw is that teachers trusted that students could perform to high expectations in all sorts of ways like managing their own behavior, providing leadership, working together, getting interested in complex and difficult topics, answering thought-provoking questions, asking their own questions, connecting learning to life, and managing independent work. Just as the student said, CCHS students respond to this by being responsible. Here too, though, there is more. It’s not just that CCHS students do what their teachers expect; they actually become the kind of students and people that their teachers believe they are and hope they will be.

Another indicator of quality teaching and learning is how long students can stay absorbed in a single activity. Sustained engagement says things about interest, motivation, ability to do the work, and self-direction as a learner. A consistent theme runs through the journal that I kept while observing in CCHS classrooms: my amazement at how long the students were able to sustain a discussion, carry on a writing activity, work independently on research, work together on a project, and more. CCHS students outstrip students in other schools on this indicator by so much that, to be fair to them, their excellence needs to be pointed out.

Especially these days, educators are interested in the conceptual levels that students reach in their work. In other words, how deep did the classroom discussion go and were the students able to contribute to it or merely to listen to it after everyone’s feet had left the bottom of the pool far behind? Or, when students begin to investigate problems or provide explanations in their work, do they embrace complexity, or do they opt for easy answers to dodge it? Here’s what one student had to say as a CCHS class period came to its close: “Thinking’s fun when it’s like this!” She may have been a bit more excited than the norm, but her enthusiasm for challenging learning is characteristic of classrooms at CCHS.

Very often, schools with high expectations are also schools where students must fall within a narrow range of interests and abilities to be successful. Not so at CCHS. The slogan, these days, is that everyone can learn. Teachers may believe it, but their schools must be planned to allow them to practice that belief for it to matter. CCHS has an impressive level of direct individual support planned into its program. CCHS teachers know their students well, and the school’s program gives them meaningful opportunities to use what they know.

A genuine sense of community, evidence of sustained engagement, work at deeper levels of understanding, and success for many kinds of students—these are only four indicators that show how well CCHS is serving its students. Yet, the school’s impressive work would mean little if its only purpose was to produce clever graduates. The school has a vision for a Christian way of being in the world and a strong set of goals for what students should believe, understand, know, and be able to do in order to live by it. Unlike the big picture goals of so many schools, at CCHS, these goals actually matter. When I asked a student to explain her portfolio to me, she pulled out her copy of the school’s goals, saying that her portfolio would show how she had met them.  To me, the most impressive characteristic of CCHS students is their awareness that their learning is aimed at a Christian life.

Some people might walk into CCHS and conclude that its excellence came about spontaneously. Nothing could be further from the truth. The school’s quality comes from beliefs that have been carefully developed into plans, and plans that have been improved to meet students’ needs. The students’ responses matter too; they must rise to meet a school’s vision. The teachers and students at CCHS both deserve congratulations for the learning community that they have built together.

Teacher educators sometimes do a reality check on the quality of a learning environment by asking themselves, “Is this a place where I would want my own child to be?” When it comes to CCHS, I would have no reservations about answering, “Yes.”     

Lloyd Den Boer  

Graduate Student in Secondary Administration

School of Education

University of South Dakota