THE EPIC APPROACH
In order to prepare all students to be college- and career-ready, the EPIC model employs four approaches to teaching and learning. These approaches are evident throughout the student experience, in each learning place and every learning process. Students are surrounded and supported academically, socially and emotionally, to ensure active engagement as well as a self-paced, challenging learning environment. The result is that students receive a rigorous, highly personalized, and equitable high school experience that is:
COMPETENCY-BASED | EPIC High Schools utilize a multi-layer approach to teaching and learning that involves students progressing based on what they know and can do, rather than the time they have spent in class. At EPIC, the focus of teaching and learning is to help students learn, practice, develop, and demonstrate 19 competencies that indicate their academic, personal and professional readiness. This approach is centered on clear, actionable learning targets—called attainments—that students use to create, apply, manage, understand, and critique information, solutions, and the world around them. HUMAN-CENTERED Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation. It involves a commitment to understanding individuals’ needs, recognizing that lived experience is legitimate and instructive, and building and revising solutions as needed to achieve increasingly better outcomes. Classroom learning revolves around the processes by which we seek to understand ambiguous problems and ideate solutions through empathy with the anticipated user, and this reflects the very design fellowship year EPIC’s school leaders spent building their schools together, with intent and iteration.
CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE | Culturally responsive education, a holistic approach that undergirds all others, is the simple but powerful contention that achievement is anchored not just in building from one’s existing strengths but in full engagement of one’s self and lived experience. Advocates of personalized learning talk of meeting students where they are, and success in EPIC High Schools springs just as much from meeting them who they are. Unlike loose interpretations that minimize the complexity and implications of culture and identity, EPIC’s approach centers the learner as an invaluable and intricately constituted subject. Within an EPIC school, the context, content, and means for learning may vary according to individual needs while the goal for self-awareness and connection is shared and consistent. EPIC High Schools understand and anticipate that an individual’s definition of self may expand, contract, and shift over time as social, personal, and academic identities emerge and develop.
HUMAN-CENTERED | Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation. It involves a commitment to understanding individuals’ needs, recognizing that lived experience is legitimate and instructive, and building and revising solutions as needed to achieve increasingly better outcomes. Classroom learning revolves around the processes by which we seek to understand ambiguous problems and ideate solutions through empathy with the anticipated user, and this reflects the very design fellowship year EPIC’s school leaders spent building their schools together, with intent and iteration.
INTEGRATED | EPIC High Schools recognize that, in order to support students to become agents of their life paths, we must broaden the concept of college and career readiness beyond building content knowledge and academic skills to a more integrated approach that supports students to become successful and balanced adults. Concretely, this shift involves articulating a holistic set of academic, social and emotional skills, creating applied learning experiences that integrate these skills and mirror the world of work, assessing social and emotional skills alongside academic skills, and hiring staff with youth development experience to work alongside teachers to support social and emotional skill acquisition.
- The 2014-15 annual citywide school Learning Environment Survey (LES) placed all three EPIC High Schools ahead of their peers on measures of teacher collaboration, effective leadership, and trust, areas in which new schools typically struggle.
- All three EPIC High Schools were also rated above average on the 2014-15 LES for academic rigor, a strong indicator at a time primarily of recuperative learning for students below grade level and competency framework implementation.
- A vast majority of students at all three schools agreed that “What I learn in school takes into account my life experiences and helps me think more deeply about who I am,” which signals the impact of Culturally Relevant Education (CRE).
- Students most strongly agreed with statements concerning the EPIC model’s development of student leadership and safe, positive spaces for conflict resolution, which points to success in the development both of the individual and the community.
- Attendance at all three schools tracks well among effective small schools of choice and far surpasses large city high schools serving a similar population. Our students want to be at EPIC.
- EPIC High Schools received several positive, high-profile media mentions in their first year, including praise in the US Department of Education article Changing the Narrative for Youth and a two-part feature story by CompetencyWorks.