Dive Brief:

• Taylor County Schools in rural Kentucky has implemented a zero dropout policy, and to make sure its goal is met, it's employing some innovative teaching approaches that it hopes will engage students and make them want to come to school.
• One such approach involves allowing students to pick how they learn from a selection of six instructional methods, or "spokes," that include traditional, online, peer-led, and project-based learning.
• Additionally, a program called Cardinal Academy allows students to make their own learning plan with the help of an academic adviser, choosing what they work on and for how long on a given day.

Dive Insight:

While this method of letting students set their own agenda may sound innovative and empowering for students, it's also important to remember that the traditional method may not exactly be broken and that it's possible to get too far outside the box. When a similar plan was employed at Detroit's Catherine Ferguson High School, a school for pregnant and teenage mothers, there were many road bumps, eventually resulting in the school closing down. The plan, which was praised as being all-encompassing and liberating, was eventually criticized for its lax structure and inability to truly teach students. Educators (or academic advisers) went from being experts in certain fields to suddenly having to know everything so they could help students create the best paths for themselves.

In fact, when MLive reported on a student walkout at Catherine Ferguson in 2013, one of the main criticisms was that the new learning format was "robbing students of their rightful education and causing increasing numbers of students to drop out." Ironically, it's the opposite of what Taylor County Schools wants.