Nogales High's CORE Academy Focuses on Technology and Collaboration

One look at the desks grouped in fours, students huddled over laptop computers, and a roaming teacher aiding teams with the outlines that will be used to help the teens make mockumentary films and its obvious this isn’t the typical American literature class.

The students are enrolled in Nogales High School’s CORE Academy.  CORE, which stands for Creation of Revolutionary Education, is a smaller-learning academy of around 170 students launched this year that links instruction across disciplines and ties in with new the Common Core curriculum.

The technology-anchored program emphasizes critical thinking and problem solving, with instruction of English, world history, biology, and other subjects focused on one essential question students will try to answer at the end of the unit. 

Agnes Cho, who teaches World History, said one of the pluses of the program is that it requires students to interact and collaborate to get projects done.  The use of technology, including programs such as Google docs, also aids in the process, she said.

“They get to have responsibility for their learning and they get to reinforce their skills,” Cho said.  “This will be useful in the real world.  It goes beyond texting. It’s just a fun way for them to learn.” 

During one recent American literature class, students get into their groups and craft and brainstorm answers for a question on “The Crucible,” a novel about the Salem witch trials.  They also are researching McCarthyism and tying those periods of history together.

The students talk animatedly and share their impressions of the book. 

It’s a new way to learn that the students say make it more interesting.

“I like it,” 16-year-old junior Francesca Castro said of CORE.  “It is something different. I was really looking forward to it when they mentioned it.” 

Castro’s group member Vanessa Zaragosa, 16, said she likes how world history and American literature are linked.

“I like it because they mix both of the classes and combine them as one,” she said.  “And they don’t give us more work.” 

American literature teacher Wendy Mumaw, one of two to come up with the idea, said it took a year to put the CORE program together.

Smaller-learning communities are not new, but focusing one on technology across subjects was something different, she said.

“I chose teachers that are tech savvy, creative, and I knew would work well together,” Mumaw said. 

The teachers came up with mission statement, who was going to teach what grade, and the themes for each grade level.  This year’s theme for American history and literature is “The American Dream,” she said.

Four years ago, Nogales High launched the Apple 1-to-1 program, offering incoming freshmen a chance to purchase a MacBook.  That has been narrowed down in scope so that students using technology in the classroom are those in the CORE program, she said. 

The school also switched to the use of Google Chromebooks, which are a fraction of the cost of MacBooks, she said. Students can also use their own laptops bought before coming into the program, she said.

“I like seeing the students work together,” she said.  “There’s a lot of collaboration and to see the kids actually working together is rewarding to me.” 

Assistant Principal Dr. Brandon Martinez oversees CORE said students in the various grades have done diverse projects from investigating the claims of makers of consumer products to debating whether the United States should intervene in Syria.

Once the American literature class is done studying “The Crucible,” the students will screen their mockumentaries and documentaries at a film festival on campus, Martinez said. 

The one thing the team of teachers who crafted the program agreed on was that all of the projects would be Common Core driven and tie back to one of more core missions of the program itself, he said.

“It’s gone really well,” he said of the roll out.  “Within in the first five weeks of school, we did the first project.  The roll out was exciting but until that point, CORE was just a program on paper.”