Dillin, a seventh grade student at Newark Street School (NSS), had this to say about starting school with 30 minutes of daily movement:
“So my perspective is, I really like it. It gets you healthy. Your heart beats, and then you get ready for the day you have after you’re done doing it. Like you get to take all your energy out.”
Asked what would happen if he didn’t get his energy out, Dillin replies, “Oh, it’d be different. I’d be annoying. … With Power Hour, my brain is ready to learn – it, like, observes more.”
This 30 minutes of daily movement is called Power Hour (along with 15 minutes of breakfast and a 15 minute morning meeting). The school started it this year along with Exploratory Fridays, which devotes a half day each week to activities such as hiking, canoeing, or skiing.
These programs are having a positive impact already. Students seem to love it, especially students like Dillin who need to “get their energy out” or others who aren’t able to regularly access these activities because of cost or other barriers. The school has seen benefits in terms of student engagement, academic achievement, and behavior. Let’s take a look at how it works and why it is readily replicable.
Power Hour
The structure for Power Hour is simple: every day starts with 20-30 minutes of a movement-based activity. For K-2 students, it is similar to a recess. For students in grades 3-8, they get to choose among a number of activities. During warmer seasons, the choices could include biking, walking, running, or playground games. During the winter, there’s snow shoeing, cross country skiing, calisthenics, and sports in the gym.
Shared by Tim Mulligan, principal, and Ty Mulligan, grade 8 student, in a presentation at the 2023 Middle Grades Conference.
After exercising, students have breakfast and then circle up for morning meetings to get ready for the rest of the school day. In several interviews with students and adults, there was widespread agreement that Power Hour carries benefits throughout the school day in terms of focus and social connection. More on that later.
Exploratory Fridays
Once a week, students spend half of their school day engaging in experiential activities that often have a recreational or creative emphasis.
In some cases Exploratory Fridays are extensions of Power Hour. For example, students might bike each day around the school, and then head to the Kingdom Trail network on Fridays. I accompanied one of these trips and students conveyed that the daily biking was fun but that the Friday trips were the place where they got to see their skill and stamina gains pay off.
Shared by Tim Mulligan, principal, and Ty Mulligan, grade 8 student, in a presentation at the 2023 Middle Grades Conference.
In many cases, Exploratory Fridays involve community partners to provide more supervision and structure. Many of the activities plug students into established offerings that in past years may have been accessed more as one shot field trips.
Tatum, an 8th grade student, noted that while Power Hour is all about exercise, Exploratory Fridays was better described as “personalized learning.” It is less about getting the heart rate up as it is about leveling up.
Why does it work
There is solid scientific evidence behind the theory that daily movement prepares the brain for learning. Tim Mulligan, principal of NSS, had encountered this evidence in the book Spark, written by Dr. John J. Ratey. In a recent presentation at the Middle Grades Conference, Tim summarized Ratey’s evidence for the benefits of daily movement:
Opens neurological pathways that prepare the brain for learning
Cardiovascular activities actually create new neuro-pathways. The best way to take advantage of this is to engage in academics following sustained movement!
Provides therapeutic effects for everyone!
Especially for students with ADHD, anxiety, depression and other mental, emotional, and social health conditions.
Increases cardio-respiratory fitness
Develops a healthy habit that reduces risks of many chronic diseases.
Supports a healthy body composition
Promotes greater sense of self-worth and esteem
Creates positive social interactions and builds a stronger community
Tim has not been shy about sharing the research rationale for daily movement with teachers, students and community members. Mary Jane, a 7th grade student, had this response to a hypothetical skeptic that worried about a loss of “academic” time:
“Actually, studies show that biking or walking, or doing anything that exercises your body in the morning helps your brain learn better which will make our grades go up compared to having less movement in our day.”
Quite convincing!
As for Exploratory Fridays, the focus on doing is exactly what many students need, especially young adolescents. According to the Association for Experiential Education,
“Experiential education is a teaching philosophy that informs many methodologies in which educators purposefully engage with learners in direct experience and focused reflection in order to increase knowledge, develop skills, clarify values, and develop people’s capacity to contribute to their communities.”
The approaches used in Exploratory Fridays, such as outdoor learning and place-based education, are squarely in the experiential learning umbrella. Middle grades students at NSS reflect weekly in their personalized portfolios to make connections to their learning and lives.
Shared by Tim Mulligan, principal, and Ty Mulligan, grade 8 student, in a presentation at the 2023 Middle Grades Conference.
Early evidence of impact
So far, these programs appear to be living up to the promise of the research that is behind them. The principal cites several indicators heading in the right direction:
Attendance has improved
Test scores are up
Bullying incidents and misbehavior is down
There is a positive vibe about the programs. In interviews, students shared things like:
“I’ve noticed that when you are active, your brain works better” (Andrew, grade 6)
“I really enjoy it, and I do feel a difference in wanting to be at school earlier, and being more motivated to get up in the morning, get dressed, eat breakfast, and pack my bag” (Tatum, grade 8)
Yeah, it puts me in a better mood, because it’s waking me up. And I just like that moving in in the morning before I do school.: (Graham, grade 7)
“I would encourage other schools to do it, because it’s just so much fun to not just be in a classroom and just to be outside and doing all of these things.: (Ava, grade7)
These positive comments align with the survey feedback that NSS solicits from students and parents every few months. The vast majority of responses show that these programs are perceived as enjoyable and that students feel well supported. For those few who respond otherwise, the principal follows up to improve things for those students.
How do they do it
Tim Mulligan, principal at NSS, has worked with local community members to defray the costs of these programs. Through monetary and other types of donations (like letting students ride bikes on their land, or parent volunteerism), the cost of these programs to the school budget is kept to $15,000 per year.
Shared by Tim Mulligan, principal, and Ty Mulligan, grade 8 student, in a presentation at the 2023 Middle Grades Conference.
Morgan Moore, the Director of Experiential Learning for the district, supports Tim with some logistics and in making connections to community organizations. The district uses grant funds and deploys staff from their after school programs to support these types of experiences in other schools. Morgan brings in students from the Outdoor Education program at Northern Vermont University as well. At Concord School, Applied Academics teachers are the backbone of Exploratory Fridays.
Morgan notes: “Every school is different for how they can make this work. But it’s so important to make these opportunities available during the school day. Every student deserves to be exposed to these skills, the land, these local organizations, and of course Transferable Skills like teamwork.”
Making these opportunities a priority is perhaps the most important element in making them widespread and equitably available. Tim points to the challenges facing schools as the ultimate justification for innovation:
“How are we meeting the needs of all of our kids? ADHD, mental health, depression, the trauma so many have experienced. And all of us adults going through the same things? We have to try something different than what we’ve done in the past.”
So every school is different, and it is time to try something different. Getting students moving and exploring is a great place to start, however you do it.
How will you get students moving and exploring at your school?
Natalie Smith, a middle school science educator at Lyndon Town School, in Lyndonville VT, originally presented “Making Science Authentic: Teaching Place-Based, Decolonized Ecology in the Middle School Science Classroom” in January 2021. She presented it as part of the 2021 Middle Grades Conference at the University of Vermont.
Below please find a recording of the workshop, optimized for solo or team playback.
The workshop itself contains a number of prompts for reflection. We encourage you to listen to these materials as a solo practitioner, or with your teaching team. Additionally, we present an annotated transcript of this presentation for your use.
Recording
Audio-Only Version
Annotated Transcript
Let’s jump right in to my pet peeve.
For those of you that aren’t familiar? You are lucky. This video is The Wolves and Moose of isle Royale (video), and I’m not going to inflict it on you.
I’m being a little unfair to this video because it’s a really fascinating study in population dynamics. In how a closed ecosystem like Isle Royale — which for most of the year animals can’t come and go because it’s so far removed from the mainland — how predator and prey relationships are shaped on that island when one of those populations, the wolves, undergoes a drastic decline.
That all sounds really great to me, as a scientist. And it probably sounds really great to you if you are a science teacher. But I have a major problem with this video.
My problem is that for the past six or so years, I’ve been in and out of various science classrooms as an instructional assistant and as an intern, and every time we get into ecology, we show this video.
Every classroom I had been in, and every school that I had been in, this video has come up.
Then, I had the opportunity to start at Lyndon Town School (LTS) this year.
The previous 7th grade science teacher shared with me her old materials. And right there at the top of the unit plan there, they were again: the wolves and moose of Isle Royale. For me, they’re fascinating.
But for the past six years, I have sat there through this video and watched the faces glaze over. Because there are two groups of kids that are really into this video:
the middle school wolf girls are really into this video (because there are wolves in it);
and the kids who already see themselves as scientists are into this video.
And everyone else has no way of accessing science through this video.
I’m going to be honest with you: I’ve seen this video seven or eight or nine times now, and I still could not tell you on a map where Isle Royale is. I think it might be in Michigan or Minnesota or one of those other M States, but going to be honest: not a clue. Plus, I could be making that fact up.
And that’s the problem.
If I, as a science teacher, as someone who spent four years studying biology, have no connection to this video, how am I going to expect my students to connect to the subjects that I’m teaching them? If I start out with something that’s got no relevance to their lives whatsoever (unless they’re the middle school wolf girls).
So, in starting my year out at LTS, my goal was to make a significant change to how we teach ecology.
And I’m kind of fortunate that I am the only 7th grade science teacher. I am the only one in my building that is teaching ecology. So I got to say: you know what? I am not showing the wolves of Isle Royale this year. We are doing something different.
So here was my goal in this unit.
My goal was threefold.
First to get them engaged, to get them asking questions and investigating solutions by second, making them see that every single person who walks through my classroom door (or rather in COVID times, every single person who is in the room when I walk through the classroom door) is a scientist.
And to make sure that everyone who is in my classroom can see themselves reflected in the science that we’re learning.
And to do that part three, I wanted to make the science personal. By building a connection for them to the stuff that they were learning.
So here’s my mission statement. It’s beautifully phrased and you are welcome to read it, but what it boils down to is that I wanted my students to engage in the work of thinking like a scientist by making the material relevant to them. And by breaking down the idea that there is any one right way to interact with their ecosystem.
Before the unit started. I gathered some data, because I’m a scientist.
So in my traditional start-the-year survey, I snuck in a few extra questions beyond the:
Who are you?
And what’s your experience with science
What are you passionate about?
And what do you want me to know about you?
In between those, there were 10 I statements that were related to cognitive engagement, and those were around topics like:
whether or not my students ask questions when they’re confused;
whether or not they had strategies that they employed for understanding material;
and whether or not they have goals for their learning;
whether or not they talk about their material outside of my class and make connections between what they’re learning and other topics.
For these questions, I had students rank themselves from one to four, which really irked them. Because middle school students love nothing more than selecting that answer right in the middle. And they couldn’t do that.
They had to scale themselves from one to four, with one being, “Nope, this doesn’t describe me at all” and four being, “Yes, this is me overall.”
What I saw was that my students were willing to ask questions, but they were not at all engaged in making connections between science and the rest of their lives.
And I want to show you two graphs that show what is the most telling for me.
The statement that I gave them was, “I talk about what I am learning in my classes outside of school”. And over 60% of my students were in the, “that does not sound like me” range. Only 12.8% — five of my students — talk about what they are learning outside of school.
Or at least did at the start of the school year.
And the other one that was very telling for me was, “I try to make connections between the things I’ve learned.”
Again, more than half of them in that one to two range, and only three students saying, “Yes, this sounds like me. I make connections between the ideas that I’m learning.”
So.
The goal is to change those two sets of numbers.
And here’s where we started instead of the wolves of Isle Royale. I started with this book: Tom Wessel’s Forest Forensics, which is based off his longer book, Reading the Forested Landscape. And if you are a science teacher in Vermont, this book was made for you because this is a field guide to figuring out the history of a new England forest.
So.
I took this field guide and broke it down to make it a little more student-friendly. I turned it into some real, yes or no dichotomous keys. Where my students could take them out into the woods around our school and use them to draw a conclusion about what our school’s land was used for before 1991, when our building was built.
We spent a glorious day out, roaming the trails with dichotomous keys, hunting for pillows and cradles and inspecting trees for scar tissue and identifying insect species that we could use to determine how old the forest around us was. In order to draw a conclusion about *our* place specifically and what the history of it was before we got there.
The conclusion that my students mostly reached was that they are convinced that our school was built on an old growth forest.
Before we came to that spot, this was undisturbed forest land. Rich.
And we built on this unit from that foundation.
From saying, “These concepts are relevant to this spot that we are standing on.”
We can get the big vocabulary and we can talk for hours about what abiotic and biotic factors are, and what different types of symbiosis are.
But all of these things are happening here. All of these things are things that you as an individual are a part of.
From there, some of the stuff that we did in this unit?
I built in some time for them to say, here’s what I want to learn about.
One of the topics that I was able to build, with some resources shared with me by Judy Dow of Gedakina, was a playlist that many of my students engaged with around traditional tribal ecological knowledge.
Based off my second book recommendation for you for the day, Low Tech by Julia Watson, we did lab work related specifically to Vermont waterways. I gave my students a map and said,
“Okay, here’s where my parents live. Here’s where we are. I’m driving between the two places. You tell me where to stop. And we’re going to test the water from those places to see, which is the healthiest. “
Lake Willoughby was the winner, and Winooski River was the loser in our lab testing. Make of that what you will.
Students chose what concepts I presented them with under the broad umbrella of ecology and ecosystems. I said, “Okay, what out of this interests you most?”
So we spent a week focused on what makes something alive, anyways. And how do scientists know if something is alive? Including the classic lesson on sewer lice.
For those of you that are about to be concerned, sewer lice are raisins in some kind of carbonated beverage. But because they are paired with this fantastic video from Carolina Biological Supply, I can convince any room of students that sewer lice are a real organism.
And then they get real grossed out when I start eating them out of the test tube.
It really generates a conversation when I finally reveal to them what the sewer lice are.
Okay, what fooled you?
What made you think that this was alive?
And how is this such a hard topic for us to understand?
But the ultimate goal in this unit was to get them to here, to our final project.
Which was to say: you are a member of this ecosystem for better or worse. You are a member of your ecosystem. And because you are a human person, you are capable of making more drastic effects than any other single part of this ecosystem.
So.
You have needs as an individual. You have things that you love. How can we meet those needs? How can we fulfill those passions while still meeting the needs of our ecosystem?
Okay.
I turned them loose on identifying topics that were important to them, which ranged everywhere from art and art supplies to sports (which was terrifying for me because I am not a sports person), to farming to old cars. You name it, they loved it.
Whatever they came to me with, we worked together to identify how that topic impacted the ecosystem.
So to give one example: one of my students is an artist. And this student really wanted to do something related to art. So what we came up with was looking at art supplies and how those are made. Could we make them with better materials? So that you can still do art while not contributing to the problems of overuse of plastics?
Once they had a topic, I turned them loose on some research.
They had to come back to me with the answers to four questions.
They had to give me some background info just because I can’t be an expert in everything. And they had to tell me:
How does this topic or issue or passion affect our ecosystem?
What changes are possible to make?
What are people doing already?
And if we make these changes on a broader scale, what would the impact be on our ecosystem?
Then finally, once they had those answers, they designed some kind of a multimedia project to share what they learned. And the goal here was that they would be sharing it, not just with me, but with someone out in the community to try to affect change.
Unfortunately, the last bit of that goal was kind of the stumbling block for this unit.
I learned that 99% of seventh grade students are not willing to have their work shared with anybody but their teacher.
So, the student in this example ended up focusing in on two art supplies: ink and paintbrushes. This student identified that a major problem with art supplies is plastics and how much plastic is used to make the materials that we use to make art. This student also identified how to make their own ink. They identified how to make their own hair for the brushes. And wood-based paintbrushes to use with that ink.
The art that is on this poster was partially accomplished with the ink that this student made to demonstrate me that this was a viable alternative.
They were able to identify that not just the plastic, but the actual materials in the ink itself are bad for the environment. So that making their own ink and making their own brushes would help to mitigate the problem of plastics being tossed into a landfill.
The other outcome?
This question has come back to haunt us from the start of the presentation. I talk about the things we learn outside of school. So when asking them specifically about this unit, we started off with 60% of middle schoolers down in this one to two range Well, over 60% instead are in the two to three range, moving towards talking more about what they’re learning outside of class.
Unfortunately, this next one didn’t change as much as I would like.
The making connections between what I’m learning and other learning and outside ideas? These numbers stayed fairly consistent from the first survey to the last survey.
We had about 50% down in the one to two range when we started, and 50% still down there.
I think a large part of that is two-fold.
Part of that was that they did not want to make a connection to the outside because they did not want to share their work.
But the other part of that, another major stumbling block that I didn’t anticipate with this unit, was a vocal group of students who walked into this final project and informed me that they would only be doing a topic where they could say everything that we as humans are doing is right, and nothing should change.
And we’re starting to see that same group of students in the humanities. Applying those same ideas to their work around politics and history.
So part of my next step for this unit, when I teach it again in the future — I’m going to keep working on this unit – is to find a way to de-center the idea that the way we as white people in the Northeast kingdom are doing things is the right way to do things.
Part of that is that this unit needs more connection to the Wabenaki people, whose land I am teaching on right now.
And part of this unit that would exist if these were not COVID times would have been an excursion into Vermont’s returned tribal forest plains. They’re right up the road from our school, but too far away for us to get to on foot. We were not able to travel to them this year.
And then in the future, I want all of my units to eventually be viewed through this lens.
So all of my science units at someday are going to start with:
How do I connect these people that live here to this concept?
Why does what I want to teach matter to the people that live here so that I can convince the people that live here, that they are scientists?
Other exemplars from this unit
Wildlife Bridges
Bees
Please feel free to take anything you find in my slides and adapt it to the people that are learning science, where you are.
Questions from the Audience
Question on de-colonization: “My question is how many students or more about the demographics of your students? So are you teaching children? Are there Black children, other Indigenous children in your classroom? How does that influence your teaching? And you use the word ‘decolonize’. Can you talk a little more about what you mean about that and how it’s related to anti-racism?”
Thank you.
So yes, my demographics up here in the Northeast Kingdom. It is a very white part of a very white state.
In total, I’ve got 48 students and of those, we’ve got three Black students. We do have some that claim Native heritage, but not that they have talked about to me. So it is a very white part of the world.
For me, when I think about decolonizing, what I’m thinking about is the fact that for most of the science that we teach, what we are teaching is very centered around white male ideas of how the world works.
Most of the history of Western science does not acknowledge ideas outside of the history of Western science. So even like, if I’m teaching space right now, traditional science classes dictate that I should be teaching about Kepler and Galileo. I should teach about all of these people who did phenomenal work in helping us understand how science works right up through the Hubble and Hawking.
And all of those people that I just named are white men.
But we don’t acknowledge in a traditional unit the fact that Arabic astronomers were first people to come up with accurate maps of the sky. That they were first to calculate the size of the planet earth.
We don’t acknowledge Native peoples that keep accurate understandings of the sky. And that tell stories based on the stars that we’re looking at.
So when I talk about decolonizing a science class, what I’m thinking about is this idea that there are in all of the history of science, so many ideas that don’t get acknowledged because they weren’t published through the traditional channels of white male science.
Question on the language of decolonization: “I guess what I wanted to say was do you use words like with middle schoolers, like ‘whiteness’ and ‘white men’ and ‘white supremacy’ and, and things like that?”
I want to give you an example of an easy way to bring that into the science classroom.
In my work group, I have an acknowledgement of birthdays. And part of what I acknowledge every month is a famous scientist birthday.
Now, that has involved things like the fact that we don’t know George Washington Carver’s birthday, because he was born into slavery. And despite all of his great acknowledgements, I can’t say happy birthday to him. I have to acknowledge him on the anniversary of his death. We have no idea when he was born. And other Black scientists have had their work so belittled that they were not able to work in the field of science. They went into other fields, like education.
So, yeah, and I probably don’t do as much work about it as I should because I am still white and sometimes it slips my mind. But I do try to make those acknowledgements and use that specific language with my students.
Question on assessment: “Do you have any strategies for getting students to problems in systems when they think they are doing something perfectly?”
So, I’m not going to promise that this is a perfect strategy, because it did not work with all of my students, but for some of them, what worked really well was to say,
“Okay, this is obviously something that you feel very strongly about. Now go find me the data, because this is science class and we are all about data. You are going to go forth. We did some work at the start of the year on what a reputable source and science looks like. So I know you know how to find those. You’re going to go out, you’re going to find me the data. And you are going to report back on what the data says.”
Question on centering Indigenous history in a science curriculum: “I’m curious because you did such interesting discussions around the Indigenous people. In terms of the Wabenaki, the Indigenous people who started here, I’m wondering how you can, as you go forward with this type of thing, test to actually kind of center that more? What can you do to incorporate that history as the center? As you’re going out into these beautiful lands and these beautiful places? How can you bring that up and use your science lens?”
Right. So, in thinking about that, here’s one of the things that immediately comes to mind. I had a part in my unit where we were focused on: why does this matter? Why does it matter that we learn about ecology?
And the first thing that I thought of to pull out was John Muir. His essays on the American wilderness, and the importance of keeping wild spaces.
The first thing that comes to mind with that question — and something that is now going to be part of this unit going forward — is replacing that writing. Because it’s a powerful writing, but it’s also John Muir mostly writing about the Sierras. I know that Judy Dow and other Native American people in this area have written about the beauty and the importance of place.
So that’s the first thing that comes to mind for me: bringing those voices even more into my classroom. Saying: why does it matter? Well, here are the people that have been here since long before. They are going to tell us why it matters.
Question on including Indigenous and Black families in curriculum design: “I’m a student teacher, and I had to write up a lesson plan called the invasion plan. And I chose centering Indigenous people. Before we ever talk about Columbus or anything like that, centering them in the curriculum first. And one of the things, one of the suggestions that I got from the rethinking schools book was if there were any Indigenous children in the classroom, to let them know what you were going to talk about. And I’m wondering also, so how do we include families of Black children and Indigenous children when the majority are white in the classroom? How do we encourage those families and those children to be centered in those conversations?”
Thank you. And good luck with student teaching; I was there last year.
So, normal teaching, I have been told, is not like this year. But yeah, I don’t know if I have an answer so much to that as an agreement. It would be incredibly powerful to bring the voices of those students and those families whose cultural experiences are so very different from the bulk of my classroom into the conversation.
And part of the reason that I’m not sure I have a good answer for that, is that there is really no good way to bring those families into the conversation in my classroom right now. Short of putting them up on screen in Zoom — which for a lot of our families, the access might not be there.
It’s hard to get them involved in the conversation. But I absolutely agree with you that bringing those voices in would be incredibly powerful.
Question on Vermont eugenics & the science curriculum: “I’m thinking a lot, mostly because of work with Judy Dow, about how eugenics has served as a way of erasing Indigenous people in Vermont. And so when I hear folks in especially in the Northeast Kingdom, say that their students are all white? It makes me wonder if part of that is erasure because so many Abenaki families had to assimilate to survive. To avoid sterilization and by the State of Vermont and to avoid being institutionalized by the State of Vermont. And what I’ve been wondering about is if we had a better statewide approach to teaching about the Abenaki and the other Indigenous folks that lived on these lands, whose rightful land, we are living on. Would we have more families feel comfortable sort of owning and claiming their heritage?”
Yeah. I feel like it’s a real disservice that we don’t teach about eugenics in Vermont. We’re gonna lose people who know the meaning of that heritage. So I’m just just thinking about that.
I’ve actually been trying to figure out how far I can push the envelope with my students and my administration. One of the units that I get to hit before the end of the school year, is I get Human Body.
And one of the thoughts that I had around that unit was to spend some time on what makes us look different, and why it is that we perceive these differences in such a negative way and treat these differences so differently, and with such anger and violence. Really pushing them at that notion of how much more alike we are than we are different.
So that was a foundation that I was wondering if I could get away with, for my human body unit. And I may be pushing into that later this year.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
Natalie Smith’s slides:
The 2021 Middle Grades Conference was made possible by the Middle Grades Collaborative, a combined project of the University of Vermont, St. Michaels College, Castleton University, and Northern Vermont University.
The fifteen year old boy slowly hobbled from the parking lot to the school’s main office, stopping to adjust his crutches. He was welcomed by the school’s Flexible Pathway Coordinator, Ian Dinzeo for their 10 o’clock appointment. They both sat down, masked, at opposite ends of a table in the school cafeteria – which offered more room to spread apart than the coordinator’s small office. Mr. Dinzeo listened as the young man described the challenges of navigating a traditional school schedule, physical therapy, and family concerns about COVID.
With an expanding Flexible Pathways Program Flexible Pathways program in place, Mr. Dinzeo was able to offer this student options that kept him in the game of school during an especially challenging time. The 18 different pathways now available at North Country Union High School students didn’t just happen overnight.
The program grew strategically from the right combination of leadership, passion, and increased need for more flexible options for students.
Similar to many other schools in the state, North Country Union High School started to research different approaches to Flexible Pathways in response to Act 77 in 2013. For several years, Flexible Pathways opportunities in the school were coordinated by a guidance counselor and a half time Work Based Learning Coordinator. After the school hired Ian Dinzeo as its full time Coordinator, the Flexible Pathways Program blossomed serving over 1000 instances a year of students taking advantage of more flexible learning opportunities.
Click or tap to enlarge.
As North Country educators immersed themselves into the developing proficiency based graduation requirement, Chris Young, principal, saw the growth of “a widely held belief in our school that we need to provide as many ways as possible for students to meet graduation proficiencies. This set the Flexible Pathways up to be the main vehicle that we use to get to more transferable skills level proficiencies rather than just content level proficiencies.”
Listening to Principal Young, it’s obvious that he has an innovator’s mindset with a bias towards action. He describes himself as a leader that is “comfortable living with some ambiguity and not putting up artificial barriers to implementing some of these program.” He is committed to providing the Flexible Pathways program the freedom and support to continue to build opportunities so that students have access to a lot of different ways to get where they want to go”.
It is obvious that passion of the school leaders, the staff, and students are key contributors to the growth of the Flexible Pathways program. “Our flexible pathways program would not be successful without the contributions of the majority of teachers and staff within the building,” says Dinzeo. “The more the faculty and staff believe these pathways are to educational benefit to our students the better. During my first year we were still targeting a small number of Teacher of Records for our independent studies, that pool has grown over time as more of the staff started to buy in.”
“With staff buy in comes student buy in. I strongly believe we have the buy in from the majority of our staff that this is a viable educational option for our students without the loss of academic rigor. If a certain pathway lacks the rigor or something else the staff is not shy about providing feedback. This leads to the overall improvement of said pathway and the betterment of the pathways program as a whole.”
Ian’s passion for meeting student individual learning needs as well as his leadership skills stand out. His previous experience as the school’s athletic director serve him well in this role. He understands that to grow and sustain a program, you need a strong base of participants, visible wins, and community support. He’s no stranger to motivating students and teams; he applies the same strategies he used on the athletic fields to academics.
Photo credit: Ian Dinzeo
His active listening skills help him identify students’ personal interests, which he uses to motivate students to set achievable goals and create a plan to meet those goals. Instead of recruiting coaches, he now recruits teachers and community members to support students in reaching individualized goals through a wealth of flexible options ranging from more structured non-traditional programs to a student’s individual pursuit of their passion or interest.
More structured options like North Country Arts and Communication Academy, The STEM Academy, The Kingdom Course, or even the local Career and Technical Education program bring together students with similar interests. Some options (community service and mentoring programs) have been put on hold due to COVID. The school also offers students an opportunity to select either “structured” or ‘student designed” independent study options.
Principal Young, also acknowledges that a key area he can provide support in is to build systems where educators’s commitment to flexible pathways are sustainable. Ideas for growing a pool of ‘teachers of records” for student independent projects range from providing stipends for teachers to tapping into school leaders to supervise independent studies.
COVID and the school response to the pandemic created an even greater need for flexible options for students. With several families choosing remote only options for their student, North Country High School’s Flexible Pathway option was in high demand. The program quickly added distance learning pathway offerings from Vermont Virtual Learning Cooperative and Edmentum. Fifty eight students are currently engaged in the distant learning pathway.
North Country predicts that COVID will also increase the demand for credit recovery options. High school principal, Chris Young is putting together a team to create multiple credit recovery pathways to meet the upcoming need. The school’s well developed Flexible Pathway program will be instrumental in that process.
Ian understands that each pathway has different logistical needs; although some translate from pathway to pathway some needs do not and it still takes time to tweak pathways and have them grow. He’ll bring his experience planning, piloting, reflecting with others, and making changes to the process of preparing additional flexible learning opportunities for students as the school prepares for post-COVID learning.
Ian is determined that as the Flexible Pathways program continues to expand, it will always be centered around student voice. Noticing that a teacher voice easily overshadows student voice in the design of a personalized learning plan, Ian has adjusted the process of engaging a teacher to support a student’s individualized project plan. “We use to bring in an educator early into the planning process of a individual student project. I now work with the student to design a draft of their plan before we bring in a supporting teacher,” explains Ian.
As the options for Flexible Pathways continue to grow, it will be important to start preparing students to use their voice and leverage these options by advocating for their own learning needs. Middle school passion projects or genius hour projects can help create a mindset where students take accountability for communicating what they need and become designers of their learning. “Every single kid ought to be reaching out to their teacher with something — specific question about science problem, an assignment, or a bigger problem like I need to meet graduation proficiencies,” explains Principal Young.
“The good news is that during our pandemic response, we got really good at identifying the most important things a student had to learn,” he continues. “We now have a tighter more accurate description for the portrait of a graduate. Flexible pathways provide ways for students to develop the transferable skills proficiencies that are part of that portrait.”
How do we effectively engage people in our community who aren’t already predisposed to discuss race and the impacts of racism? How do we pull people into a community conversation on race? Especially people who aren’t already striving to be more antiracist? I’m not entirely sure, but I do know that the more community conversations we have, the more likely we will bring a greater portion of our community to the table… eventually.
I live in a predominantly white, rural community where many people do not explicitly experience the harmful impacts of racial bias nor understand the complexities of structural racism.
So I was intrigued by this email I received from a historian about the namesake of our local elementary, Thatcher Brook Primary School:
“I wonder how people in town would feel if they knew that Partridge Thatcher and his wife had held people in slavery.”
Indeed, how would my community react to this new information? That would become the guiding question for a community conversation that brought together students, educators, community members and historians to talk about real world, meaningful change.
How it started:
I received the email in response to an inquiry I had sent to Dr. Elise Guyette. I had written to her after hearing her on the Brave Little State podcast Remembering Vermont’s 19th Century Black Communities, which was largely based on her research. At the end of the episode she invited people to contact her to receive her database of early Black Vermonters.
Just a few weeks before I had been part of the formation of the Waterbury Anti-Racism Coalition (WAARC). I had been invited due to my role in facilitating a monthly series of Race Conversations for the Waterbury Public Library. Over the course of the prior year, a few dozen community members had participated in discussions of Ijeoma Oluo’s excellent book So You Want to Talk About Race?
Now, I believe in the power of dialogue about racism to help lay the foundation for transformational action.
As Oluo taught me, one of the reasons racism persists is because people, particularly white people, are not able to talk about it. Learning and unlearning how racism operates are the first steps toward dismantling and disrupting it.
Even so, upon learning this new information about the direct connection between the elementary school that my daughters attend and the institution of slavery, my first reaction was that we needed to take immediate action to get the name changed. But when I brought my obsessively assembled historical research to my WAARC friends, cooler heads prevailed. We were looking for inroads to raise awareness about racism and strengthen the collective antiracism commitment in our community.
Rather than rush to action, we decided to use this new information as a catalyst for collective learning and coalition building. It was time for a community conversation.
8 lessons learned from a community conversation on race
Now that I’m on the other side of the event, I’m happy to report that it was a success. Here are eight tips for anybody who wants to organize a community conversation about an issue related to racial justice, based on our experience.
1. Form a committed planning team
It was Ellie Odefey’s idea to focus on learning, rather than pushing right away to change the name of the school. She’s a student.
She’s also a member of WAARC and a student leader in the Rooted Organizing Committee (ROC) chapter of Harwood Union High School. ROC is a student-led socially justice oriented organization based in Vermont with a presence in several secondary schools. ROC focuses on grassroots strategies that will create change “from the roots up.” One of their values is community.
Ellie recruited some ROC student leaders to join WAARC members as a planning team. We had a multi-generational cross-racial group with plenty of experience organizing for change and facilitating conversations. We scheduled a weekly one hour meeting for the five weeks before the conversation. And then we were off to the races.
2. Learn from others
As we began planning, we researched how other processes have played out. We looked at the powerful project-based learning approach (.pdf) to renaming a school taken in Brookline, Massachusetts. We read up on efforts to rename schools and streets across the nation. And we reached out to folks in Vermont such as the Rename Negro Brook Alliance for tips.
Judy Dow generously provided guidance in the early stages of our planning. She is the Abenaki educator and activist who led the effort to change the name of the Dorothy Canfield Fisher Award due to the links of its namesake to the eugenics movement. She drew on her experience to emphasize the importance of having the background research compiled and clearly presented. “There will be pushback. Be ready.”
She also helped us understand the importance of involving students. Judy is an expert at supporting project-based learning that involves students in primary research about Vermont history. She recommended that some of the educators involved in the planning group bring the Partridge Thatcher history directly to their students.
Luckily, Ellie already had a plan for that.
3. Start the conversation in school(s)
When Ellie came up with the idea to make this into a learning experience, she wasn’t just talking about the community conversation. From the beginning, she wanted to bring the idea to Harwood Middle and High School students as well. She volunteered to create a lesson plan and worked with school administrators to distribute it to all 50 advisory teachers.
When Jonah shared Ellie’s work with the planning team, educators from other schools asked permission to adapt the lesson for younger grades. Eventually students across our district in multiple schools learned about Partridge Thatcher’s past and discussed connections to modern day racism.
For me, that is such a powerful example of a student exploring a Flexible Pathway to learning. An example of a school community being able and willing to support that student’s learning. And a way to tie a student’s passion for learning to real-world, authentic change.
Ellie’s lesson plan allowed students to process their own reactions and prepared them to participate in the community conversation. We hoped that they would go home and talk with their families about it as well. Because there was plenty of buzz well before the event.
4. Anchor the conversation
We wanted to make sure that the conversation wasn’t purely theoretical. But we weren’t trying to organize a debate, either. We wanted people to grapple with the implications of our community’s ties to slavery and racism in a way that was respectful and learning-oriented.
Educators on our planning team who had been teaching about racial justice busted out tools to support productive dialogue. We ended up using the agreements and compass from Courageous Conversations (for an example of these in action in a classroom, check out this unit on equity and identity from 6th grade social studies teacher Christie Nold).
We also wanted to make sure that people entered the conversation with the same basic historical facts at hand.
In response, I developed a packet of historical information. The packet presented the information in multiple ways, with a visual timeline, select quotes, and related background reading. Dr. Guyette provided feedback to ensure accuracy.
We wanted to provide people access to the information in whatever way best suited them. For some people, the bare basics might suffice, while for others they were going to click through to the source material. And some folks may not want to read at all. For them, we created an interactive timeline.
Jonah Ibson, a Harwood teacher and planning team member, worked with students to create audio clips to bring choice quotes alive.
Even people who didn’t attend the event were able to learn a lot from the informational materials.
5. Get the word out
About three weeks before the event we started advertising. We used multiple channels:
Front Porch Forum – each Friday, volunteers posted to this local message board site
Flyers – we created a simple poster (.pdf) and put it up around our community
School newsletters – principals announced the event in their messages home to families
Public library – the Waterbury Public Library co-hosted the event and included it on their website and in their emails to members
Social media – we made announcements on the WAARC FaceBook page and some members tweeted about it
Special invites – we sent customized email invites to local community leaders such as the School Board, Select Board, and historical societies
There was a lively discussion on Front Porch Forum about the event. Most of the comments were skeptical, but a few people also expressed support. I wrote directly to many of the commenters to encourage them to join the discussion. In two cases people realized that they were being interpreted differently than they intended and they wrote follow up posts for clarification.
The pre-conversation conversation had begun.
6. Provide facilitators with plenty of support
Kathy Cadwell, philosophy teacher from Harwood Union High School, joined the planning team early on to lend her expertise on organizing community dialogues. She has worked with students to offer several Socrates Cafe events over the years. And she has an amazing website about strategies for scaffolding dialogue and her expertise and enthusiasm were invaluable.
We envisioned facilitator pairs made up of one community member and one student leader. Students from the planning team recruited fellow students who had facilitated other dialogues. Almost all of the adult volunteers ended up being educators from our school system.
The week before the event, we held a 90 minute facilitator training where we:
Talked through the flow of the event
Introduced tools such as norms we would be relying upon
Provided time for the eleven pairs to meet their co-facilitator
Role played a conversation and debriefed it
Based on the feedback at this training, we refined the facilitator guide. Most co-facilitator pairs met before the event to discuss roles and make sure they were totally set.
I can now say with certainty that they were well prepared. Because on the big night, they were amazing.
Agenda from the facilitator notes.
7. Execute your plan with purpose and flexibility
We asked participants to register via Google Form. In addition to giving us an idea of numbers, we were able to gauge what type of crowd we were going to have. We were able to see, for example, that the vast majority of people who had signed up were coming due to genuine curiosity about the subject.
Alysia Backman, a WAARC member and fantastic educator in her own right, handled the tech for the evening. She created Breakout Rooms on Zoom by asking the facilitator pairs to put their assigned number in front of their name. During the introduction, she randomly assigned all 80 participants and matched co-facilitators.
Gavin Thomsen, a student provided a powerful land acknowledgment;
an educator went over the agreements;
and Dr. Guyette did a quick review of and commentary on the historical materials.
Having Dr. Guyette provide historical perspective was incredibly powerful. She had put me in touch with one of the descendants of people who Thatcher had enslaved. I was honored by the fact that this woman, Karen Henry, and her husband, Dean Henry, attended the event. As Dr. Guyette presented they sent me a private chat message and asked to say a few words. The Henrys then shared the story of how they had learned about their ancestors’ connection to Thatcher. And they thanked the community for grappling with its past.
We had planned our agenda to the minute yet this unexpected portion of the evening was one of the most powerful parts. Many participants shared on the exit survey that this was something they would never forget.
How it’s going:
Our stated goals were to learn together and build community. And our exit survey suggested that we accomplished that. More than 90% of respondents answered positively on questions about whether the event it was a good use of their time and whether people were respectful of each other. The Waterbury Roundabout did a favorable follow up story as well.
Next, our planning team will go to the School Board to recommend that they initiate a process for changing the name of the school. We will recommend that they do so through a process that centers student leadership and collective learning.
We had Select Board and School Board members participate in the event and I’m optimistic that the renaming process will continue to be a source of growth for our community.
I’d imagine that some families had conversations about race that broke new ground. Perhaps some students took ideas home or adults picked up on the hubbub or some combination thereof. Although there was a lot of focus on the event itself, I’m hoping that the ripple effects had positive impact as well.
The biggest obstacle to fighting racism in my community is that many people deny that racism exists here. But to me, each community event about racism is part of an ongoing reckoning. For things to change, we’ll need every community, including predominantly white ones, to acknowledge the harmful impacts of racism. Especially on people of color but ultimately on all of us.
This event was a step toward normalizing consequential conversations about race in our community. As we learn together as a community, we build shared understandings and commitments to more effectively work towards racial justice. Together.
Will schools really re-open this fall? And what will they look like? Most of all: how will we ensure that our teachers and students are safe?
Even though I usually do my best to think about anything but school during summer vacation, this year I’ve been tuning into the conversation on reopening.
Why?
For one simple reason: the way our schools adapt to the challenging circumstances of this fall will have enormous implications for Vermont’s students.
And the students most at risk of inadequate support during this transition, as usual, are Vermont’s most vulnerable and marginalized students.
It wasn’t so long ago that I was in high school myself.
I grew up in Jericho, VT. I graduated from Mt. Mansfield Union High School in 2015. But for the past year and a half, I’ve been researching what has become one of the go-to strategies for remote education in Vermont: personalized learning.
And what I’ve found says a lot about how schools should go about reopening.
My full research report (.pdf). It’s available through the Brown University digital repository.
The key ingredient: a personalized learning coordinator.
As people in the education community know, there are four main flexible pathways for personalized learning in Vermont:
work-based learning
online learning
dual enrollment
and career and technical education.
As schools explore creative ways to engage students remotely, it’s likely we’ll see an uptick in the use of these programs.
In my research, I crunched the numbers on dozens of different factors to see how they were linked to student participation in flexible pathways.
When I did, one relationship was stronger than all the others, separating schools with robust flexible pathway programs from those with weak programs. It was almost too obvious.
What was the magic ingredient? A coordinator.
Schools that had a personalized learning coordinator on staff tended to have higher rates of student participation in their flexible pathway programs.
Without diving too deep into the methodology, it’s worth explaining where that result comes from.
In the fall of 2019, I sent out a survey to all principals of Vermont public high schools asking about their personalized learning and flexible pathways programs. I asked for all sorts of details: professional development priorities, advisory programs, student leadership, parental engagement, and more.
35 out of 60 principals – 58.3% – provided data. And the numbers told a story.
Without any fancy statistical methods, I could estimate the rates at which students across the state were actually participating in flexible pathways. I could see how many schools had a devoted personalized learning coordinator.
But actually crunching those numbers revealed results that were even more telling.
When I regressed flexible pathway participation rates on each school-level factor, I found there was a statistically significant positive relationship between the presence of a pathways coordinator and student participation in flexible pathway programs. Even when controlling for school size and student poverty rate.
Having a pathways coordinator on staff was associated with an increase in overall flexible pathway participation of five to fifteen percentage points.
When I interviewed some of those coordinators, the reasons for this bump in participation became clear.
Flexible pathways can help students learn in new and engaging ways. For example, at the workplace through an internship placement. Or about a new topic – say marine biology – through an online course.
But these opportunities can be difficult for students to set up on their own. And without a coordinator to help them select the right options and then navigate the registration process, many students miss out entirely. Especially for students who don’t have parents actively involved in their education, flexible pathway options can become inaccessible.
Take dual enrollment, for example.
Dual enrollment allows Vermont students to take college courses while still in high school, giving students a taste of college-level content and allowing them to get a few credits under their belt before enrolling in college. The policy was intended to make higher education more accessible to first-generation students. Has it followed through on that goal?
Not exactly.
Because there are so many hoops students have to jump through to register for dual enrollment, the programs have mostly become populated by well-resourced students. “Dual enrollment is for your high-flyers,” April Wortmann, a coordinator from Mt. Abraham Middle High School, explained to me. “It kind of did the inverse of the intent.”
Similar issues crop up with online learning.
Without a coordinator, how will students find and enroll in the course that’s right for them? Or work-based learning. How will students set up an internship placement all on their own?
Again and again, I found that when students are left without a coordinator to guide them, flexible pathway programs tended to create starker divides between the “haves” and the “have nots.”
So how, you may ask, does all this play into school reopenings?
Coordinators as a COVID learning solution
As our schools experiment with hybrid and remote learning models, it’s likely that they will rely more and more heavily on flexible pathway options to engage students outside the classroom. But at the same time, many schools are facing tightened budgets, and many “non-essential” staff positions may be on the chopping block.
If my research has anything to say about how schools should go forward, it’s that personalized learning coordinator roles need, need, NEED to stay.
And schools that don’t yet have these roles must create them.
Perhaps the best way to prove my point is to explain what pathways coordinators actually do.
In early March, just before COVID shut down life as we know it, I spoke with Terry Berger, Multiple Pathways Coordinator at Leland and Gray Union Middle & High School, about her role.
She recounted a number of key responsibilities that she shoulders. Of course, these roles were pre-COVID, but many responsibilities carry over.
The following is an incomplete list:
Berger advises students on how to navigate her school’s pathway options, she runs the school’s work-based learning program and teaches the program’s classroom component. She finds internship placements for students and coordinates their transportation (sometimes driving students herself). She publicizes dual enrollment and online learning options, and manages the labyrinth of paperwork for students who register. Plus, she guides students through technical glitches in their online courses in the evening via text messaging.
Berger’s two specialties, work-based learning and online learning, may be some of Vermont’s best options in keeping students engaged this coming year while minimizing their time in the classroom.
But it’s not easy.
Any one of these responsibilities, alone, could be a headache. Together, they are hero’s work.
“Sometimes it really does feel that there’s just not enough time in the day,” said Berger.
At the beginning of each semester, Berger matches the 20+ work-based learning students to local internship opportunities. It’s a web of emails, applications, meetings, phone calls, safety checks, background checks, and more. “I don’t eat or sleep or spend time with my children for a solid four weeks,” said Berger. “It’s just absolute mayhem.”
Try pulling off an effective work-based learning program without someone like Berger. The chances of success are slim. Before her role was created, Leland and Gray’s work-based learning program was more of a “dumping ground” for students who had abandoned the college track, she recalled.
In Berger’s short tenure at Leland and Gray, the composition of the program has changed completely. Describing her students, Berger said, “They’re college-bound, they’re trades bound, and there are opportunities for all of those kids. It’s not just the kids who don’t do well in school.”
For maintaining equity in personalized learning programs, coordinators like Berger are essential.
The right fit for the job
A number of factors seem to determine who makes an effective pathways coordinator.
For one, connections in the community.
Berger believes that her status as a local boosts her effectiveness as a coordinator. “I know everybody,” said Berger. “That for me has just been the key.” And though it’s not her go-to technique, she admits that she has landed internship placements for students while in line at the deli or the hardware store.
Another key? Flexibility of schedule.
Like Berger, Patty Davenport, Pathways Coordinator at the neighboring Springfield High School, often works in the evenings to better support her students. Usually it’s after school that students are logging on to dual enrollment and online learning courses. She makes sure to be available in the case of any glitches.
Going forward there’s good news and bad news.
The good news? Vermont schools have the capacity to support all students as they navigate personalized learning opportunities, regardless of socio-economic status. Many of the coordinators I spoke to had already found innovative ways to do so.
The bad news? These schools are the exception not the rule. Many Vermont schools do not yet have flexible pathway coordinator positions, and as they figure out what this coming year will look like, they have some catching up to do if they seek to make personalized learning accessible to all students.
In the age of COVID, this change is urgent.
Should out of school internships be available only to students who know where to look? Should project-based learning be a reward to students already who have the supports in place to work independently? And should online dual enrollment courses be restricted to those students who know how to navigate the college registration systems and the classroom norms?
Think about students with unreliable internet access. Think about students without a quiet room to in which work. These are the students who have been historically underserved by our schools. They are disproportionately low-income. And they are disproportionately first-generation college hopefuls.
They need someone in their corner. They need someone like Terry Berger.
So yes, even if it means thinking about academics during summer vacation, I do care about how schools are reopening this year. Specifically, I want to see them reopen with flexible pathway coordinators ready to lift up the students hardest hit by the pandemic.
Myself, I’ve never even fired a gun, but Henry has been interested in learning how to hunt for several years. Given that he was born in Vermont and has a doting outdoorsman grandpa, his lifetime Vermont fishing and hunting license was purchased when he was 6 months old — despite zero input from the infant. Twelve years and many conversations later, Henry enrolled in an early September hunter safety course in Southern Vermont.
The sticker, the patch and the handbook: Henry is an officially certified Vermont hunter.
Hunter safety courses in Vermont propose two options. Given our family’s other time commitments, we chose to enroll Henry in the homestudy program. It’s an online course which has two in-person dates once you finish your coursework. The other option is a traditional series of classroom courses — usually in the evenings and in select locations. You can find out more about Vermont Hunter Safety courses here.
In our case, Henry had until Saturday, September 7 to pass all units and the comprehensive hunter safety exam. That meant he had some significant homework to complete during the summer in August. And our goal was for him to finish all coursework before school started on August 29.
Hunter education is real learning
When we registered and logged him into the portal on my computer, I showed him how the course seemed to be set up. It was easy enough to follow, since the materials automatically advanced from lesson to lesson in each unit. As we looked closer, we realized that Henry had nine online units to complete. And sometimes, one single unit could contain as many as 13 lessons. Holy smokes! This was an enormous amount of work!
But Henry was up for it.
Even though he was committed and super motivated by the looming deadline, this online coursework took serious effort.
Each lesson required close reading.
Each lesson required comprehension of both text and video resources.
Topics ranged from hunting history to hunting ethics and responsibility. After each unit, a test demanded a demonstrated application of knowledge. As a parent, I was learning how to support my son in his most ambitious learning experience to date. But the most surprising part? None of it was done in school.
16 days of serious, rigorous out-of-school learning.
Henry receives his official certification. Photo credit: his proud grandpa.
When Henry passed the course, I saw pride and accomplishment wash over his face. My middle-schooler son set himself a goal, worked hard at the learning, and achieved his certification. As a proud mama, there are few feelings that can compare to seeing your child succeed like this.
Valuing every learning opportunity
My son’s work in hunter education moved and impressed me. Yet I can’t help but think of the large scale of this learning across the state.
In my sixteen years of teaching young adolescents, I have likely had several dozen boys and girls like Henry pass through my sixth and seventh grade classes. How many of my former students had participated in Hunter Education courses?
I vaguely remember memory a student in my literacy class asking me if his Hunter Safety course workbook could count as his nightly independent reading. And I shudder, because I know that my answer was not a resounding, “Of course it does!”
And that makes me wonder: just how many of my student hunters pushed themselves to learn this way?
Regrettably, I as their teacher knew nothing about their Herculean feats. Only now as the mother of a similar child, can I acknowledge the important and real-life learning that was taking place.
Hitting targets
Throughout this home learning scenario, I saw my son demonstrate many of his grade level proficiencies. As a seventh grader, his teachers set learning targets around reading comprehension, like: “(I) can determine the central idea of the text and recognize the development of supporting details throughout the text and provide an objective summary”.
I watched him nail those reading targets through this Fish and Wildlife assessment.
I learned Henry is not just a dedicated student, but a good shot as well. (Photo credit: still his proud grandpa).
Don’t even get me started on how many Transferable Skills learning targets he touched. I think about this learning target, for Self-Direction: “I can demonstrate initiative and responsibility for learning” and then this one “I can persevere in challenging situations”.
Henry took complete responsibility and ownership of this learning. The course tested his attention span; he had to experiment with new comprehension strategies. He had to muster more self-direction and persistence than I’d ever seen from him. Henry hit the targets in the shooting range as well as the learning targets; he’s actually a very good shot.
But how do his teachers know about his proficiency?
Does he have opportunities to inform his school about his learning out of school?
How do we as a state implement structures to document and acknowledge the learning that children and young adults do outside of school walls?
Hunter education in a Flexible Pathway environment
When Vermont committed to the ambitious outcomes of Act 77 in 2013, the state agreed to provide flexible pathways for learning in grades 7-12. What better example of a flexible pathway experience than a Hunter Safety course?
Inviting conversations between schools and parents about learning is a key component, so I plan to share stories about his Hunter Safety education with Henry’s teacher at his upcoming student-led conference. His interest in and exploration of Vermont Hunter Education truly fits the definition of what we hope young adolescents pursue in personalized learning environments.
Additionally this September, the Vermont Agency of Education (AOE) published the Flexible Pathway Implementation Kit. This kit provides important tools to help schools develop and communicate profiles for flexible pathway opportunities.
Across the state, students like Henry are engaging in real-life learning outside of the classroom. A Vermont Hunter Safety course is just one clear example.
And how can teachers be informed about this learning?
How do they recognize and acknowledge the hard work?
Whose responsibility is it to manage the communication between out-of-school and in-school learning?
It’s a start, but I’d love to hear some thoughts both from #vted teachers and leaders, and also Vermont Fish & Wildlife and VT’s AOE. We’re one of the most innovative and vibrant education communities in the nation. Let’s figure this out.
We had a chance to hear from student digital audio producers at Randolph Union High School, in Randolph VT.
They, along with innovative educator Raymond Cole, shared what makes this project-based learning class such a hit.
A full transcript follows below.
In this episode of The 21st Century Classroom, in tiny Randolph VT, students are turning digital audio producers, complete with a CD release party and plays on local radio.
And they’re doing it in school.
Bailey:Right now, I’m currently working on a more trance piece. If you know DeadMau5, he’s a trance deejay and he makes kind of trance-y song. It makes you, like, get upbeat but it’s kind of like you’re lost in the world. That’s what I’m working on right now. And it’s very… It has live synths and pads, which is all very airy.
Randolph Union High School has begun offering a digital music class that uses a technique known as project-based learning to support students in learning about music, technology.
And more importantly, how they best learn in a classroom setting.
Emma:Well, usually, we come together in the beginning of class and do something together. Maybe we’ll analyze a piece of music, share some of our music, talk about tempo, chord progressions. Then, we branch off a d either work in collaboration with each other or alone. And that’s the time when you really start to need to be… Like your mind goes into its creative space.
I think something I really struggle with sometimes is that writer’s block sort of thing. I think if anybody, or any other student’s experience that while writing music, it’s a really real thing. And it’s hard to overcome and it can feel really frustrating. But if you have somebody to collaborate with and say,
“Hey, come on, will you listen to my piece?”
It can be really helpful to gather other people’s input and really help move along the creative process.
Raymond Cole is teaching Randolph’s digital music course as part of the school’s focus on project-based learning. Project-based learning is a type of personalized learning that fuses student passions with concrete actions in the world.
Students begin each project-based learning cycle by focusing on an idea they want to bring to life in the world, creating meaningful change.
Raymond Cole:My name is Raymond Cole. I am the music teacher here at RUHS, Randolph Union High school. I teach grade seven through 12. I teach jazz band, concert band, choir, digital music, and then a seventh grade general music class here at the school. I have done music technology in the past at other schools that I have taught at, and it’s been a really big part of my musical growth since I started doing music. I thought it was really really cool being able to teach a project based learning class at PBL. I usually teach most of my classes through projects anyways, so it kind of really fit really, really well.
At the beginning of this year I went to a weeklong professional development session on PBLs and project-based learning classes, and learned how to teach a project based learning class, and ended up coming up with this idea, then working backwards from it. And it ended up working out really well.
Cole has found that project-based learning’s focus on creating, making and doing has changed how he approaches his role in the classroom.
But not the content.
Raymond Cole:I’m really more of a facilitator in this class than a teacher. Very rarely do I spend a lot of time in front of the students lecturing or giving out information that way. I usually build projects that allow them to figure out the information for themselves. I ended up having our big end-of-the-year exhibition project planned out, where we were going to create a CD and then broadcast it on a radio station and worked backwards from there.
We started out the year basically saying,
“Okay, this is where we need to be. What do we already know that will help us reach our goal, and what do we need to know in order to reach our goal?”
I already had an idea of what we did, but I wanted the students to be able to kind of figure that out for themselves, and then from there I structured projects that allowed them to gain this knowledge through doing the project. We started out on some more basic softwares, and working with loops, and already premade music, and they had to piece together.
That way I was able to teach the structures of music through a non-traditional sense instead of just saying, “This is form and this is how it sounds.” I have them say, “Okay this is form” and build a song using these pre-made loops to emulate that form. It’s all learning through doing versus learning through absorbing.
A key component of project-based learning requires that students undertake projects that are both personally meaningful and authentically connected to the world around them in some way.
For these students, focusing on their tracks included anticipating releasing them as a digital mixtape, complete with a potential CD release and outreach to local radio stations.
Willam:With this, we have to email and talk to people, call and get communicating with the radio station. It’s been a lot easier to know how to set stuff up. Like groups, parties, releases and stuff like that.We had Adam, one of the students, email the radio station, collaborate with them. Like:
“When do you want it to happen? When is a good time? What’s going to happen? How do you want us to set it up? What do you need?”
Just stuff like that.
Emma:I hope to be able to share something that I feel really proud of and say, “Yeah, I wrote this.” And be a little surprised at where I’ve come. I hope to take away a lot more music theory knowledge of more tempo and stuff like that, and harmony, and just music theory that I could take away to use in the traditional music world.
Meet Emma. She plays multiple traditional musical instruments, and this class is her first foray into digital music.
But she’s already noticed a change in how she approaches both disciplines, and creative effort in general.
Emma:Okay. My name is Emma. I’m in 10th grade and I go to Randolph Union High School.
I had been playing several instruments since I was younger. I mostly played the flute, but I do play a little bit of piano and guitar here and there, and music is just something that really interests me, and I happened to have this period free. Digital music is something I had never really tried out so I figured, “Why not take a chance?” It ended up being something I like. I’m really glad I decided to do it.
Usually, we come together in the beginning of class and do something together. Maybe we’ll analyze a piece of music, share some of our music, talk about tempo, chord progressions. Then, we branch off in either work in collaboration with each other or alone. And that’s the time when you really start to need to be… Like your mind goes into its creative space.
I think something I really struggle with sometimes is that writer’s block sort of thing. I think if anybody, or any other student’s experience that while writing music, it’s a really real thing, and it’s hard to overcome and it can feel really frustrating. But if you have somebody to collaborate with and say, “Hey, come on, will you listen to my piece?” It can be really helpful to gather other people’s input and really help move along the creative process.
When I first started the class, it was a little hard to share my music because music can be a really vulnerable thing. I think I’ve grown though since then like, become more proud of the pieces I’m making; I don’t think that any of the challenges are bad though.
I think that’s helped translate into like other classes or just life in general, like being more proud of what I’m doing and taking pride in the creative process. Yeah.
Bailey:After you make something, and you like it, and you hear it, and you hear it… And if you show someone else and they like it, then that’s probably the most satisfying. As long as you like it. Then when you hear someone else confirm that your feeling is right. Then that’s probably the most satisfying part.
Project-based learning provides a space for different levels of learners to take enjoyment from the shared, collective experience of building. In project-based learning, when you have a shared purpose, it creates something greater than the sum of its parts.
Randolph senior Max came to the class with a very different set of musical experiences, and has taken a different pathway through it.
Max:Yeah, I started producing music on my own when I was in 8th grade and I learned a couple of different types of software. I mostly taught myself how to do it all. I started releasing music on SoundCloud under my name and released an E.P. when I was in 10th grade. I’ve learned all the technology mostly on my own and over the course of it, I got a really solid understanding of using multiple kinds of software.
So I signed up for this PBL digital music class because I’m actually someone who’s been a music producer for a long time, and it’s always been a passion of mine. But it’s never been something that’s been taught at school. I haven’t really seen very other people getting into it. So, I signed up for this class to kind of be a resource, to help others learn and to have fun with people who are into something that I’m really into.
It’s been really good for me in this course to be able to help other people through every step of the process because we have people at every different skill level come into this class.
Yeah, this class isn’t so much about my own goals. I think I’m mostly in this class to really teach others what I know. I think it’s really important to have classes like this, and have this stuff being taught in schools because it enables people to express themselves musically and actually have a platform for that and not just have ideas but not be able to pursue them. I think that’s kind of why I’m in here, is to really make people want to take it seriously and inspire people.
And for teacher Raymond Cole, all of these outcomes are a success for the class.
And for project-based learning at Randolph.
Raymond Cole:Well, with music it’s all very subjective. Success means a lot of different things. We actually had a discussion about what success was towards the beginning of the year. Because some people might think success would be being able to write their own song without any help and all that kind of stuff. Whereas some people would find success in being able to even understand what they are doing.
It really depends on the student, and I think what we ended up coming up with was success meant reaching the goal they had set for themselves before they started the project.
Being able to write the song that they wanted to write or convey the message they wanted to convey whether it’s through loops or through stuff that they wrote and it’s on varying levels too, which I thought was really cool because each student could kind of have their own measure of success as they went.
I basically tried to sculpt the beginning of the year in a way that everybody could be successful, and that everybody can learn what they needed to in order to progress. Which was really cool because that way I could kind of take my time being a new teacher here at Randolph. I could tell them, okay, this is what we are doing today. And then watch them figure it out on their own versus me having to stand in front of them. Then test to see whether or not they’ve figured out what they are supposed to figure out.
Bailey is an 8th grader at Randolph and when he joined the class, had no prior musical experience.
But he’s already gotten deeply into the production side of things.
Bailey:Right now, I’m currently working on a more trance piece. If you know DeadMau5, he’s a trance deejay and he makes kind of trance-y song… it makes you like get upbeat but it’s kind of like you’re lost in the world. That’s what I’m working on right now. It has live synths and pads, which is all very airy. We’re using popular song form right now — which is intro, verse, chorus — but pretty much what I’m doing right now is I’m adding in the beginning a very mystic feel. Then it’s going to have a lead up, a drop, and it’s just going to hopefully blow your mind.
Obviously, I hope when we release it to the radio station people are like,
“Oh, this is fire!”
And want it. But I guess it’s all up in the air, it depends what people want. If they like it, I guess we’ll go from there.
That’s a key component of project-based learning — and really any transformative learning experience.
Students have the choice of what they learn, how they learn, and why it means something.
Bailey:Hopefully, after this year, I’m hopefully going to be coming back to this PBL, and so hopefully by then I will have a track that I am very proud of. I’m still working on my main track right now, but at a year’s time I hope I have at least a small collection of tracks that I’m really proud of.
This has been an episode of The 21st Century Classroom, podcast of the Tarrant Institute for Innovative Education, at the University of Vermont. Huge, unending thanks to Raymond Cole, Elijah Hawkes, and all the students in Randolph Union High School’s digital music class for their generosity and their patience. The episode was produced by Audrey Homan and Life LeGeros.
It has been a true pleasure to listen to these students and their work, and if you want to hear more of their tracks, head over to Soundcloud.com and look up “The Galloping Circus”. It’s the name under which Randolph’s students released their first collaborative album, “The First Act”. Give it a listen.
What does it look like when twitter bots work towards improving our world?
Bots have a rightly deserved rap for being used nefariously, but much less attention is paid to when they’re used in ways that enhance the world. And you may have students for whom the exercise of writing a bot can unleash their specific creativity and introduce them to the idea that writing code can be used to effect positive change.
Let’s take a look at four functions for twitter bots that can actually improve the world.
Wait, slow down. What’s a bot?
Great question. A bot is an account you create on twitter that tweets automatically. You can set it to tweet when:
a specific set of conditions are met;
or when the value of a variable changes;
or to just tweet out a specific string of text at intervals.
Bots exist on other social media platforms, like Facebook, but today we’re going to be looking at the ones on twitter.
But aren’t bots a bad thing?
Like almost everything else online, they sure can be. A few years ago, social media platforms including twitter had much more relaxed rules about bots, which led to some people creating many bots that were designed to impersonate real people, with the aim of influencing political elections. There’s evidence this may be ongoing.
At 2 in the morning, hundreds of Ted Cruz supporters all woke up to issue the same exact statement on Twitter. Nothing suspicious about this. Nope. These are all just proud, patriotic American citizens, all deep in the heart of Texas. pic.twitter.com/Sp4qWELhT5
But this form of coding — creating a small tool that can do repetitive action indefinitely or quickly parse large data sets — shows no sign of going away. It’s a coding exercise that shows no sign of wanting to return to Pandora’s Box, so it’s up to us squishy, breakable humans to figure out how to use it to make things better.
1. twitter bots performing radical self-care
One of the most pernicious aspects of social media is how it can be a massive time-suck. This can be good (waiting at the doctor’s office) and bad (um, any other time). Sometimes you just need a responsible bot to step in and remind you of the world outside your screen.
The two bots have a very simple, paradoxical purpose: to make twitter a more human place.
Additionally, most of their tweets encourage the user to work towards a healthy online-offline balance; that’s right, they exist online to help users remember to get offline.
Self-care bots you and your students could build:
A basic compliments bot;
A specifically class- or school-based compliments bot.
But what about a twitter bot that fights bullying? You can build a bot that’s set to search for certain terms and take actions based on them. So, for example, a bot keyed to search for the term “meanie”, could simply respond to each instance with “Hey, that’s not okay. We’re all here trying to be nice.”
One of the things twitter bots are best at is monitoring a data set and taking action when it changes. How does this make them good at civic engagement?
Angelina Bethoney wrote the twitter bot @LawsMass, which monitors which legislation is currently being worked on in Massachusetts. She made the code open-source, and encourages other people to write legislative bots for their own states. A good and easy way to keep paying attention to what’s going on in government.
Vermont does not currently have an Open States twitter bot. Hint, hint.
Another type of civic engagement bot is the popular “_edits” bot. Popularized by @NYPDedits and @congressedits, these bots simply make note of when the encyclopedic powerhouse wikipedia is edited. And by whom. As wikipedia continues to allow anonymous edits, bots like these that track edits to a range of IP addresses (such as those assigned to the NYPD, or Congress) provide valuable information.
What kinds of civic engagement bots could your students create?
How about partnering with your local school board in creating a bot that tweets out meeting agendas, guests and changes?
3. twitter bots creating art
Even though everything’s terrible, it’s still okay to make tiny, beautiful things. Maybe even because everything’s terrible. And you can make twitter bots that create and share tiny arts.
They’re small, powerful acts of tiny art that interrupt the unending flow of misery current news cycle on a user’s feed with the reminder that things can still be beautiful.
What kind of tiny art could your students share with the world?
A photo of a classroom bulletin board each morning;
A collection of student art that’s added to at regular intervals;
A photo of a random place around the school paired with a motivational quote.
In partnership with a local museum or historical society, artifacts from their collections.
Bots like these are relatively simple: they pull one piece of data from a larger data set and send it out into the world at regular intervals. The biggest challenge with these will be with assembling a data set in a uniform format to pull from.
4. twitter bots monitoring remotely
Need to know when a specific condition changes? Think of a door being opened, then closed. A light turning on and off. A cat going in and out. Wait, wha–
@PepitoTheCat is a bot whose sole purpose is to record when Pépito, who is a cat, goes out at night, and when he comes back home. That’s it. It’s brilliantly simple and powerful. It performs two valuable operations. One, it records data based on these conditional events. And two, it’s creating a new record with all this data that can be examined later.
Think about how your students could implement something like this as part of a science experiment:
How often does the temperature drop below a given value in the turtle tank?
These are super fun. They work by connecting with tiny science-y (yes it’s a word) sensors and recording data from them. So, in Pépito’s case, there’s a sensor on the door flap that registers every time the door is opened. This, in turn, triggers a camera to take a photo. The photo is then tweeted out with its timestamp.
Folks who are looking for next stage arduino projects, projects that actually do something? Right over here.
But remember, these type of bots are also collecting data while they tweet. They’re doing the work of building a data set for your students to later analyze. Remember @grow_slow?
My little bot @grow_slow has been taking a photo of my fiddle-leaf fig plant every morning at 10:17 am for over two years. I finally put all the photos together, so here's what 2 years of growth and movement look like!!! pic.twitter.com/58q4RvAMGg
A twitter bot like Pépito’s certainly needs some additional parts and a little more thought than one that simply cranks out quotes from your favorite Agatha Christie novels.
What kind of bot could your students create? What problems do they want to use it to solve?
What might be your child’s first experience with business? That’s right: the lemonade stand.
I mean, what is cuter and more compelling than a few eager kids selling sugar water? Believe me, I’m a sucker for a lemonade stand. In fact, I’m a sap for anything created by and sold by kids. Just something about those earnest faces and homemade products makes me start peeling the bills out of my wallet.
But, what makes kids so eager to create those lemonade stands every summer?
I suspect it’s because business is power for kids.
For better or for worse, our children are raised in a commercial culture where buying and selling, profits and losses tend to rule the world. When you are small and young, you feel that power is beyond your reach. You see it belonging in an adult world, but it’s not a world that you are allowed to enter. So, when a child is allowed to enter the adult world of business, it feels like competence. And when kids are given that competence and power, the result is legitimate and passionate engagement.
This year, I took the lemonade stand concept a step further with my own child, and learned a few things along the way.
Parenting a student-run business
It was summer-time in Vermont and we were finding creative ways to pass the time. As always, I was eager to find things for my kids to do. My oldest child started a summer job for the first time and was raking in the dough, and my eight-year old daughter, Jane, was envious of his cash. I proposed that Jane enter to host a table on Kids’ Day at our local Manchester Farmer’s Market. The Gray Wolf pop-up shop was born.
All we needed was a concept, products, some marketing, and a sales approach. This was serious business! We settled on this being a store for relaxation and creativity. We would sell bath products (bath bombs, salts and scrubs), friendship bracelets and kits, and woven wall hangings. It was a pinterest dream come true…
And my daughter was fully invested.
The challenge for mom was to keep her focused and manageable. You know, making 30 bath bombs was not in the cards (we made five). As the event neared in mid-August, we needed to nail down some business details. Did we need a “store name”? This decision took the longest of all. I felt like it was akin to naming your first album. Jane chose “Gray Wolf” as the name for her shop after her favorite color and her favorite animal. Done and done.
The learning was anything but temporary.
What I saw from Jane in this farmer’s market experiment is the kind of out-of-school learning and effort that educators and parents dream about. Not only was she was motivated and engaged to succeed and make money, but she was developing essential skills. She was learning how to communicate, persuade, persist in design challenges, and implement a long-term plan.
Kids are often begging to get involved in the adult world of economy. Check out the story of Mikaila Ulner, who turned her lemonade stand into a booming business. Not only is her business financially successful, but part of her company mission involves solving a real problem in the world: helping the declining bee population. She calls herself a “social entrepreneur” and shares her business tips.
What can we learn from these examples?
We can learn:
That when we allow kids to participate in the global or local economy, their engagement is strong and real;
That when kids create and manage their own business concepts, they are learning truly important life skills;
And that kids are compassionate beings, and they are capable of seeing ways of creating businesses that do good things for the world.
Do your students have an interest in business? Are their schools supporting those interests?
I would love for you to share your thoughts and experiences with me.
Public displays of learning are not always the end.
How do you know when meaningful, relevant, personalized and authentic learning has really occurred? Is the charge and scaffolding strong enough to continue the learning after the in-school time has expired?
One measure is looking at what happens after the project ends.
A small group of these 6th grades at Peoples Academy wondered how they could help their peers be more engaged in the school’s Opportunity Time, time devoted to goal-setting and exploring student interests, so they took on the challenge of designing a digital badging system to incentive their peers.
Students at Green Mountain Union High School demonstrate learning in Science, Social Studies, Health, and Language Arts over the course of a semester. But for one group of students, there are no barriers between subjects, no bell schedule, and no borders on their classroom. Much of their learning happens out of doors, either in the 200 acres behind the school, on the Long Trail or in other outdoor locations.
Flood Brook School buzzed with excitement. Students brought in their projects on tables or on carts, the weight sometimes shared with friends. As they set up their displays, parents, teachers, younger students and community members milled about, waiting for the opportunity to learn more about student projects and process. One student fired his trebuchet in the center of the room to great fanfare.
It all starts with an idea. Races Against Racism have taken place around the country, and last spring, a community member and organizer Henry Harris suggested that 15-year-old Hope Petraro organize an event in her community. He said she might be interested in having this event in Montpelier. That was just the spark she needed.
Since then, Hope, with the support of her teachers and community mentor, has created an important event to fight back against racism during a time when our country is seeing a resurgence of racial conflict.
The United Nations has kicked off a movement for the future. They’ve identified 17 goals for sustainability world-wide, and they’ve given those goals to students around the world.
Here in Vermont, a cadre of passionate educators are scaffolding project-based learning around those goals. And #vted students are hard at work, changing the world, one community at a time.
As teachers and students grapple with how to implement proficiency-based assessment, flexible pathways and personalized learning, what can we learn from digital badge eco-systems? What’s been tried? What’s worked?
And what do we need to think about as we implement micro-credentialing to help us grapple, not just with the requirements of Vermont’s Act 77, but with this profound shift in education as we know it?
It takes a combination of flexible pathways and student passion.
Peoples Academy Middle Level 6th graders Noble Beerworth, Josephine Simone, Anna Isselhardt, and Jacob Fougere won big at this year’s VT Tech’s Bridge Building competition. They built a bridge that withstood 1,089 pounds of pressure, but the story of how their school helped them get there is equally impressive.
In Sam Nelson’s classroom, students choose what they learn, and how. Through the use of learning scales and targets, Nelson sets guidelines for students to demonstrate proficiencies in whatever they choose to study. Between the two systems — flexible pathways and proficiency-based learning — students negotiate a curriculum that keeps them engaged and satisfies their curiosity about the world around them.
Every teacher should consider making time for Genius Hour (sometimes called 20% time or Passion Projects). We know that when students are given the opportunity to explore their own topics, they gain skills in self-direction.
But I’ve come to believe that the ideal Genius Hour involves as much of the school as possible. Here’s what it could look like.
Art is “the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination”. To teach children that expression or application sounds like a lofty endeavor. But that is exactly what art teachers do in our schools every day.
If art is the expression of creativity and imagination, then we need new models. Because art is about voice and originality. There is no right and wrong way to express your vision and creation.
At The Compass School in Westminster, Vermont, students advance through grades by producing evidence of their accomplishments from the year, using the previous year’s reflection to inform the current one. We had the chance to sit down with a student just finishing 11th grade at Compass, and hear not just about his Y.E.A.R. (year-end academic reflection) but how it’s going to prepare him for the all-important graduating Roundtable.
A small group of these 6th grades at Peoples Academy wondered how they could help their peers be more engaged in the school’s Opportunity Time, time devoted to goal-setting and exploring student interests, so they took on the challenge of designing a digital badging system to incentive their peers.
Flood Brook School buzzed with excitement. Students brought in their projects on tables or on carts, the weight sometimes shared with friends. As they set up their displays, parents, teachers, younger students and community members milled about, waiting for the opportunity to learn more about student projects and process. One student fired his trebuchet in the center of the room to great fanfare. 
As teachers and students grapple with how to implement proficiency-based assessment, flexible pathways and personalized learning, what can we learn from digital badge eco-systems? What’s been tried? What’s worked? 
Peoples Academy Middle Level 6th graders Noble Beerworth, Josephine Simone, Anna Isselhardt, and Jacob Fougere won big at this year’s 
In Sam Nelson’s classroom, students choose what they learn, and how. Through the use of learning scales and targets, Nelson sets guidelines for students to demonstrate proficiencies in whatever they choose to study. Between the two systems — flexible pathways and proficiency-based learning — students negotiate a curriculum that keeps them engaged and satisfies their curiosity about the world around them.
Art is “the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination”. To teach children that expression or application sounds like a lofty endeavor. But that is exactly what art teachers do in our schools every day.