Charter school offers innovative approach
By Marshall Helmberger
What would a charter school look like in Tower-Soudan? That’s the question a group of local residents is working to answer as they begin the lengthy process of establishing a new option for learning in the community.
With the school district looking to shutter the high school as part of a major restructuring effort, supporters of the charter school see the new facility not only as a way of maintaining a local public school, but as a means to innovate with new educational models. Such innovation was the idea behind charter schools, which are less encumbered by state rules and regulations that sometimes stifle creative, new approaches to learning in traditional public schools.
One such new approach is on display every school day at the Northern Lights Community School, in the tiny town of Warba (pop. 183), located near Grand Rapids. The school is one of about 150 charter schools now in operation across Minnesota, and it’s one of a growing number that utilize a teaching style known as “project-based learning.”
Three members of Tower-Soudan’s charter school development group (including this reporter) visited the school in Warba last week to learn more about how charter schools operate— and about project-based learning itself.
The Northern Lights Community School is located in a former elementary school that was closed several years earlier by the Grand Rapids School District. That closure provided the space for the new school, which now serves about 110 students in grades 6-12.
A different approach to teaching
For visitors, it doesn’t take long to see the differences between the school in Warba and a more traditional public school. The school day begins a little before 8:00 in the morning, well before the students arrive, as about a dozen teachers and staff gather round a big table in the office to go over the day ahead. Much of the discussion focuses on the basics. Who’s going to drive students to their public service activity for the day? Who will bring lunches to the kids participating in a regional track and field day? There are reminders of upcoming workshops, deadlines, and of how to handle a particular student with a specific need.
It’s an easy-going planning session, and it impressed Muriel Scott, of Soudan. “It seemed everybody was so engaged in all these activities and what was going on in the school,” she said.
Director Dave Hagman, who has taught in more traditional schools in the past, sees the morning meeting as a good way to build relationships among members of the faculty. “It helps to tell the good stories that are going on here,” he said. “That’s critical to how we relate to our kids.”
If the morning meeting was a contrast with a traditional school, they just kept coming as the students began to arrive shortly before 8:30 and headed for their rooms, called “advisories” rather than classrooms— a distinction that is much more than just a name. Unlike a traditional school, students don’t sit in desks lined up in rows and listen to a teacher at the front of the room. In the advisories, students each have their own work station, with a computer (shared by two students) and other resources that they use in completion of their many subject-based projects.
Scott was impressed with the feel of the place. “It was a very different atmosphere. Everyone was so open. And the way the whole day was structured, it was so different.”
While the students do attend small-group classes in subjects like math, and are required to spend part of every day reading, much of the remainder of their time is spent on projects they’ve developed with help from their teacher/advisors. The projects typically involve researching a particular subject, be it in history, geography, foreign language and culture, or science, but the projects more often than not help students develop a wide range of skills, from learning to generate their own ideas, meeting deadlines, learning researching techniques, and public speaking.
The students not only have to present an idea for a project, they must meet the objectives and present their work to a group of teachers, and sometimes larger groups, when it’s completed. The credit they receive in that subject area is based on the amount of time and effort the project entails, as well as the quality of their work.
“I really do like it,” said Brianna Colonbe, an eighth-grader at Warba. “You have a wide choice of what you want to learn. You still have to get credits in science and math, but you can pick the way you learn it. The teachers are much more adaptive to your individual needs.” That’s typically the case in project-based schools, since each student develops his or her own unique learning program, based on their particular interests and aptitude.
Jimmy Ranso, a senior from Cohasset, who switched to Northern Lights from a traditional high school this year, says he likes the different relationship with teachers at Warba. “They’re more like parents than teachers. We have good conversations and you’re more comfortable asking questions,” he said. “And emotionally it’s a lot different. The teachers here are happy. They really want to be teaching.”
Becky Gawboy, of rural Tower, said that much was clearly evident during last week’s visit. “The degree of cooperation between students and teachers was palpable,” she said. “It’s a place that’s really designed for student success.”
The project-based approach to learning has other advantages as well, particularly for small schools. Because the students work relatively independently on their projects, the traditional segregation of students by age is not just unnecessary, it’s undesirable. At Warba, the 18-20 students in each advisory run the gamut from sixth grade to twelfth, and it’s a diversity that the students say they enjoy. And students frequently work together, across grade levels, on joint projects.
Gawboy said the multi-age classrooms make it easier to maintain viable student-teacher ratios, even in a small school. That’s been a problem in Tower-Soudan, particularly in the high school, where school officials say class sizes have grown too small to be viable much longer.
Learning beyond the walls
Much of the learning at Warba takes place outside the classroom. “Our field trip budget is large,” says Hagman, noting that students typically take dozens of field trips a year, far more than the one or two trips common at most schools. And at least that many outside speakers and mentors visit the school to provide other learning opportunities as well. Hagman said that approach appeals to students and is more likely to unlock the enthusiasm that most students really have for learning. “That passion for learning is something that too often gets overlooked,” said Hagman. “If a kid really gets into something they’re passionate about, it can get very deep.”
Many of the school’s outside learning opportunities center around community service. Students volunteer at a local food shelf, care for animals at a nearby shelter, or make regular visits to an assisted living facility. In fact, says Hagman, community service is a requirement of the school’s educational mission, all part of a holistic approach geared towards producing well-rounded, useful citizens.
Supporters of the planned charter school in Tower-Soudan, say they also plan to do much more to integrate the “school” outside the classroom walls into students’ lessons and they see project-based teaching as a good way to do that. Gawboy noted that the Tower-Soudan area is rich in community assets, including the DNR headquarters, the underground physics laboratory in Soudan, retirees of diverse backgrounds, and the surrounding natural world, all providing potential for project-based learning opportunities. “We want to create an environment where kids can dream big,” said Gawboy. “We also want an environment that includes the whole community.”
