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Five. There are at least a half a page of notes on the mathematical significance of the number five in Wikipedia. Numerous cultural references include the number five. A couple of common idioms reference the number five: take five and high five. Its most important reference might relate to the health and wellness of children.
At the Otter Tail County Family Collaborative annual meeting last spring, speaker and founder of the Institute for Community and Adolescent Resilience (ICAR-US) Derek Peterson spoke about the need for every child to have a web of support. Ideally, this would include a minimum of five caring adults. Peterson states. “Our data says every kid needs a personal village.”
How are we doing as a community? The Minnesota Student Survey is a comprehensive tool used by the Minnesota Department of Education every three years. The survey covers students in grades five, eight, nine and eleven. I am going to reference some of the information our district’s students shared with us in 2022 and 2019.
By the time our female students are in fifth grade, 25% of them feel that the adults in the community care about them only a little or not at all. By the time our children reach ninth grade, those percentages for both boys and girls have grown to 40%. Junior girls - a disheartening 49% feel that adults in our community care about them only a little or not at all.
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I rarely title articles that I write, but this article is an exception. Welcome to “Great Expectations!”
I have been asked recently about expectations. It is something that I think about a lot. As an organization dedicated to providing our community’s children with an exemplary educational experience, what expectations should we hold ourselves accountable for as a district? Our slogan is, “Committed to Excellence!” That’s a high bar, but it also supports our mission to ensure that we create an environment where all students can reach their potential.
What do we expect of kids? Through the course of developing my philosophies over the years, I decided that it would be a far greater travesty to set expectations too low for children than to keep the bar high. They excel when provided with clear boundaries, unconditional love and support and when they know that the adults in their lives have trust and faith in them. One need look no further than the honorees recognized at the recent 2022 Fergus Falls High School Hall of Fame Ceremony to appreciate the results.
Gary Schuler served as a role model for kids over the course of a 46-year career in education. A teacher, coach, and later athletic director/dean of students - working with kids was his life’s passion. While my career in Fergus Falls only crossed Gary’s briefly, it didn’t take long to see that his interactions with kids in the cafeteria meant something special to him and to them.
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To quote a phrase popularized by Mark Twain, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.” As a person who enjoys numbers and trying to make sense of what they mean and don’t mean, I read the editorial, “Why are some schools more equitable than others?” published by the Daily Journal in late August with interest.
The editorial was based on a study conducted by an organization called Wallethub. The design was fairly simple. All schools received what appears to be an arbitrary base score of 50. From there, two metrics were factored into assigning a final number representing a district’s equity score. The first metric was based on a district’s expenditures (expenses) per student. The state average expenditure per student was used (roughly $11,500 per student) and for each one (1) percent above the state average, a point was subtracted from the 50 point base. Likewise, for each one (1) percent below the state average expenditure per student, a point was added to the 50 point base.
The second metric was based on average household income within the school district. For each one (1) percent above the state average household income, a point was added to the 50 point base. For each one (1) percent below the state average household income, a point was subtracted from the 50 point base.
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My prior articles have focused on changes to our school district’s curriculum. This column will discuss a new element to our instructional practice that is taking place across the district. The approach is called project-based learning or PBL. Last year, our teachers received training from experts in project-based learning and each created a PBL unit that will be taught this year. For some of our teachers, project-based learning had been incorporated into their instructional approach for years. For others, it will be a new practice.
What is PBL? The following definition comes from the Buck Institute for Education: “Project-Based Learning is a teaching method in which students gain knowledge and skills by working for an extended period of time to investigate and respond to an authentic, engaging, and complex question, problem, or challenge.”
An example shared during one of our training sessions showed students at a Michigan school studying the Flint water crisis and proposing possible solutions.
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Prior articles have covered recent changes to the curriculum at Fergus Falls Public Schools and how technology is used to augment instruction. In today’s world, it is essential that students also acquire technology skills as part of their educational experience. This article will discuss those skills. We are in the process of a three-year implementation of the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) standards. This is a quick snapshot of what our students will know and be able to do:
Empowered Learner
Students leverage technology to take an active role in choosing, achieving, and demonstrating competency in their learning goals, informed by the learning sciences.
- Students articulate and set personal learning goals, develop strategies leveraging technology to achieve them and reflect on the learning process itself to improve learning outcomes.
- Students build networks and customize their learning environments in ways that support the learning process.
- Students use technology to seek feedback that informs and improves their practice and to demonstrate their learning in a variety of ways.
- Students understand the fundamental concepts of technology operations, demonstrate the ability to choose, use and troubleshoot current technologies and are able to transfer their knowledge to explore emerging technologies.