Ideas by Gauri Sood & Dr. Amit Sood, framed by Heather M. F. Lyke

​By Gina Meinertz

The educators in Spring Grove knew the value of authentic learning experiences for students. We found some success with classroom jobs, math problems from real world experience, discussions based around student interest, and student choice in assessment. While these efforts were valuable and necessary in the quest to make learning relevant, they still had not motivated all our students and had not brought together our teachers in a way that broke down their silos. What was the missing link? A community partnership grounded in place-based learning.

A community partnership is a relationship between the teachers and students of a school with an organization that is long-term and mutually beneficial. The participants understand the value of the work together. They also believe and agree on common outcomes and learning objectives from the experience. In Spring Grove’s journey to become a community-based school, we have learned what makes a partnership a bonding and motivating experience.

We have multiple successful community partnerships to use as examples: a farm partnership with our middle school, and outdoor classrooms and a heritage center partnership in our elementary, and business partnership in the high school. We also have partnerships that are ending, adapting, or just an idea. Community partnerships are a living curriculum in which the relationship and experience drive the future, which is what makes the learning experiences deeper and authentic.  ​

A great attribute of a community partnership is that it is available and beneficial to every school and community. Every school has the opportunity to create a relationships with the people and organizations around it. Every student has the opportunity to make decisions, research, and take action for the greater good. And every community has the opportunity to benefit from more educators and students designing, analyzing, and working to improve something they care about.

Now that you are convinced that you need to create a community partnership within your school, how do you start? What steps do you need to take in order to cultivate relationships and spark a drive to work together? I will share steps with you. These steps will look more like building a campfire than walking a stairway. You will need to put the right tools and people together and then wait and support for that spark to build into a flame.

• Create a partnership of interested educators. The educators will be the drivers of the experience. They will be writing curriculum around experiential learning and communicating outcomes that connect to the standards. They will need to hold strong relationships within themselves, with the students, and with the people representing the community partnership. They will need to work out organizational tactics, roles of contribution, and ways to assess outcomes. This will not be an easier way to educate, but it will be more rewarding. The educators will need to trust each other and also be willing to fail. They will need to see themselves as coaches and facilitators who are learning alongside the students and guiding next steps instead of experts who will always know the next step of learning.

• Find a partner within the community. The adults form the organization who will be partnering with your school need to be invested and interested. They need to be willing to share their space, data, and goals for the future. They need to understand students’ development needs and tendencies and understand that this meaningful type of work will take time. Students will bring inspiration and creativity, but will also need structure, clarity, and support. The partner will need to be able to create an actionable outcome that is not too big, but also not superficial or fake. Students and educators will only benefit from a partnership in which their time and efforts will truly benefit the outside entity.

• Identify clear outcomes. Outcomes will be communicated in a variety of ways. This is ideal. Outcomes need to be clear and co-created by students, educators, partners, and the community at large. This will allow for grants to be written to support efforts and celebrations to take place as outcomes are achieved.

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• Understand the partnership experience will go through phases. Just like our relationship, partnerships will be always changing. Make sure plenty of time is spent in relationship building. Spend time exploring, asking questions, and spending time together before jumping into the work that needs to be accomplished. Don’t be afraid to take time throughout the experience to slow down and just enjoy each other. Plan times for metacognition, reflection, and building energy. Modeling this will help our students to understand the flow of work and how this relates to the relationships involved. Sometimes, this even involves ending a partnership. Be open to moving to a new location or working with someone new if you are having trouble identifying outcomes, communicating, or finding meaningful work to pursue as a team.

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• Pursue support. A partnership will need layers of support. Communicate with instructional coaches, leadership, and outside entities. We knew that we would like to move to competency-based reporting to bring our educational outcomes together with our partnership outcomes, so we brought in an expert to guide our experience. Look for examples, ask questions, and approach the experience with curiosity and respect.

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• Enjoy! Last but definitely not least, enjoy the experience. Remember to sit back and watch the students as they dive into this meaningful work. If it isn’t meaningful to them, they probably need more voice in the outcomes or how to achieve them. Remember that even if this work feels messy you will have more meaningful and memborable experience that will leave your students better prepared to interact with the complicated world we live in. 

 
Some of you will choose to finish reading this article here, but others will be looking for some examples of the shifts and changes our teams made in creating these partnerships. You want to hear the story so that you can compare yours. Feel free to look for similarities and analyze different. Reach out to us if you would like. We know collective learning helps us all to move forward to transform education to experiences of deeper meaning.  

Our middle school team has had the goal for about two years to break off from our high school programming to create a program more grounded in relationship with more developmentally appropriate growth experiences. We started with a math lab that connected middle and high school students around individual growth experiences in math. This setting was innovative with two teachers in one shared space. The space had breakout rooms, walls we could write on and ways for students to advance in math with flexibility in scheduling. The teachers and students were constantly reflecting and improving their approach, but our data was telling us our students needed more collaboration and more connection of the mathematical processes to real world occurrences.

The pandemic made us shift our programming to pods. We couldn’t have students intermingling, so we changed to a middle school teaming model where our teachers were teaming in instruction. We moved to Humanities and STEM programming with 7th and 8th grade students only. The teachers created a series of interdisciplinary experiences throughout the year including a park partnership where students worked with an environmental educator to map a native prairie and wildflower plan for a city park. They presented their work to the Parks and Rec and City Council Representatives before planting the garden in the spring. This work brought all students, teachers, and subjects together around learning and created an authentic audience, but we still saw a needed to build a sense of belonging, pride, and connection for the students. The teachers knew they wanted to continue to work together but needed something deeper to bring together the standards in a way that is consistent and developmentally aligned throughout the entire year. We used a Montessori article named “Erdkinder” to back our decision to connect our middle school age students to the land an phenomena around them. Research supports students at this specific age needing to take steps away from the cohesive family units to make connections with the land and greater community around them.

This led us to our farm school partnership. We saw an opportunity to bring the learning standards togethers around competencies. We brought in Rose Colby from New Hampshire to help us to map, connect, and create competencies that ensure interdisciplinary learning experiences that extend beyond academics. Our teachers know what life skills they are supporting while also mapping the content delivered in a way that connects and supports the content in other subject areas. Essential questions guide the learning, discoveries, and group projects students will embark on throughout the partnership. Teachers will support projects, deliver supporting content, and continue to co-create the learning with students with each weekly visit to the farm throughout this school year.  

Sitting on the front porch at the farm this summer, our educators and farmer engaged in a conversation of inspiration and depth. They discussed how values guide decisions. They compared efficiency, money, power, and happiness affect the decisions we make. They discussed land ownership and the historical inequities that need to be considered as we embark on our journey. We left that front porch understanding the weight of importance this learning journey holds for us and the students. We are entering a multi-generational relationship that includes people, pigs, land, the people before us, and the sustainability of the future. We hope for all participants to question, connect, and build a foundation of decision making that will affect how they impact the world. 

Our elementary teachers have been offering multi-age and traditional classrooms as an option for more than five years. Parents, students, and teachers know that giving options for student learning are beneficial for all. As a group of multi-age teachers met in a community of practice during the spring of the pandemic, we wondered how we could adapt our classroom to be safe and engaging knowing that we will be coming back to a very different educational experience than we left when schools went home in the March of 2020. I had worked with an educator from Norway and visited schools and daycare programs in Norway two years before. I had observed how the programming in this cold part of the world engaged with the outdoors much more vividly than the school from the United States that I had observed. We reach out to our Norwegian partners to find out how they were coming back to learning during a pandemic. They shared how they moved meals, classrooms, and learning objectives outside. All participants felt safer, but also more engaged and inquisitive. Our team was inspired and set out to research and create outdoor classrooms.

Our city and parents were as excited as our teachers to embark on this journey. The city funded fixing up outdoor buildings with optional closing sides to block wind. Our teachers started to use a method called storylining to map out and link standards with outdoor phenomena and locations. Students jumped into their outdoor experiences with curiosity, excitement, courage, and preparedness. Teachers co-created learning objectives by helping students to categorize their questions into learning themes.

The three teachers who created outdoor classrooms planned and planted native prairie gardens, community gardens, and improved spaces within our community. They said the experience forever changed the way they will teacher. This year, we didn’t offer outdoor versus indoor classrooms. Instead, this programming will live within our system. We will start more grow labs, start composting programming, and continue to expand on our outdoor learning experiences as an elementary system. 

Giants of the Earth Heritage Center is an active organization within Spring Grove. They research stories, connect families, help families to understand their history, and create educational experiences and displays.  They have created experiences with Spring Grove Schools for years such as a children’s parade for the town festivities, supporting ancestorial research projects for students, and writing grants jointly. These experiences have laid a strong foundation in which to grow a partnership upon. For the first time this year, we have students researching, designing, and creating displays for the community to view. We are also hoping to move our after-school and surround care offerings to this community location this school year. This will allow our two programs to bring more ages together in experiential learning. We will create a weekly schedule in which students will engage in cultural learning activities that will be united with adults, elders, and other community members. We will also spend one day a week partnering with a mental health organization to teach students resilient and caring preventive well-being and collaborative skills to support ethics and values.
 
We also hope to create a research partnership in which our students work with experts to research the early histories of our community. There are some missing links of knowledge of the people who first lived in our area, and we hope to connect with American Indian tribes and archeological organizations to better paint the picture of the entire history of our community. 

We have been documenting our high school students’ progress toward College and Career ready indicators as defined by the Redefining Ready goals distributed by AASA. We support our students to graduate with these indicators fulfilled beyond their course and grade point requirements. We having been shifting our schedule to support this whole child thinking such as a restricting of our advisory time to include foci such as connecting and supporting wellbeing, coaching students in the support skills of learning, and focusing individually and in small groups on our career and college preparedness and interests. We have also created a Redefining Ready cover page to communicate more about our student’s growth and potential the Minnesota Department of Education’s report card is able. Next steps will include more individual shift of tracking student’s growth. We are creating prototypes of portfolios to collect evidence of students’ passions, strengths, and experiences that will contribute to their success.
 
We also created a Business Experience/CEO course where students partner with four to five businesses to use the businesses’ data and vision to implement a design cycle of improvement. Students’ participated in creating newsletter and social media pages, researched the most successful businesses in small towns, and created prototypes used by the businesses in improvement.
 
The partnerships in Spring Grove have helped us to create a community-based school. Students of all ages get to make a difference within the community around them. They learn from and with people of all ages to dig deeply into the values, history, and future of our small town. Place-based learning helps our students to not only be prepared for their future, but also to be empowered and important youthful members of our current society. 

by Third Eye Education, consolidated by Heather M. F. Lyke

I am addicted to podcasts. There is something about cramming learning into my commute, pairing it with laundry, and adding it as a workout buddy that fits my hectic lifestyle. Even when life slows down, I enjoy learning while listening in the bathtub, while swinging in my hammock, or while taking a scenic drive.
 
It is because of my podcast addiction that I recently learned a few new strategies for balancing voices, and in-turn minimizing cultural-biases, when collaborating with colleagues or facilitating student discussions.

Catching up on old episodes of Unlocking Us, I listened to Brené Brown’s talk with Dax Sheppard and Tim Ferriss. This is the part of the conversation that perked my ears:

“People’s expectations and understanding of things are so different:” now, isn’t that pure truth. Yet, in leadership roles and as classroom instructors it’s often easy to inadvertently allow halos to form and for bandwagons to take over. Not only does this enhance only certain voices, but it also can minimize the variety of perspectives that are brought to the table.
 
For instance, sticking with the element of time noted above. My husband has a degree in American Indian Studies from the University of Minnesota. He has shared stories about his sophomore year Ojibwe Language class—during which he was often the first student in the room. For my husband, a cis-gendered white male from a middle class family with European heritage who was raised by parents who often noted “if you’re not early, you’re late,” being on time was par for the course. Had you asked the sophomore version of him what was going on, he’d have likely said, “everyone else is late,” “they’re not respecting the professor,” or “I thought that if you’re not early you’re late.” ​

That said, had you asked is fellow classmates—most of whom were idigenous—to write down on a sticky note about the importance of being “on time,” you’d have seen a wide swath of answers:

•  A disrupter of authentic conversations
•  A regimentation brought in by European colonization
•  An approximate time for gathering
•  A way to show respect to the facilitator (that would've been my husband’s sticky note)

 
Now, if the professor flips his sticky note first, people may wish they’d changed their response (bandwagon). If there is a classmate that many respect who flips first, others may wish they’d shared a similar response (halo). However, by flipping all sticky notes at the same time all voices get put on the table and, as in this instance, different cultural beliefs come to light. 

The thing about listening to podcasts is that it’s passive. I hit play and I take in new learning. Sure, I have autonomy over what podcast I listen to, which episodes I download, and what I may opt to fast-forward past—but it’s still passive. If we’re not careful, meetings and classroom instruction can become passive, too.

Last week, our Third Eye Education collective came together for our April session. During our time together, John Alberts of Austin Public Schools shared a new-to-him strategy that he had learned from the IDEAL Center: we all tried it. Like Brené Brown’s Turn and Learn, this approach balances voices in a way that helps disrupt some dominant cultural norms.
 
Here is the process Alberts took us through:

1. We each identified a small object that could be held in our hand—this was the virtual world’s version of a talking stick. (Had we been together in the same space, we would have all shared the same item—one talking stick for the full group.)
2. The facilitator (in this case, Alberts) shared a set of questions to work through on our own: gave us time to jot down our own thoughts.
3. The facilitator randomized participants names: this became our speaking order.
4. The first speaker (the first name listed) held up their talking stick and shared one answer from their list of reflections—there was a choice here in what they shared, and had the option to pass if uncomfortable. When done, the talking stick was ‘passed’ to the next speaker (second name listed). This process continued until all had shared.
5. For the second round—the second topic discussed—the person who started the rotation (noted in #4 above) was not the first randomized name listed, but rather the second. In other words, with each round, who begins the sharing circle shifts to a different group member, a different voice.

 
There is some magic in what may seem like a simple rotation of ideas and share alouds: each woven in intentionally by the IDEAL center in the way it was shared with Alberts and his team:

• There is an opportunity to think first (jot down ideas) and then speak, which helps offset the verbal process which tends to naturally take over conversations.
• It disrupts the pivoting back to a lead facilitator—rather, by knowing who speaks when the talking stick is passed from participant to participant, creating an equally distributed level of leadership and inclusion.
• There is an intentionality with everyone having an opportunity to speak—everyone has a voice. There is an added intentionality with knowing the order of who will speak when while also having it selected randomly—knowing when you will speak reduces anxiety, while the random distribution of who speaks when can disrupt any typical pecking order that otherwise might emerge.

 
Additionally, to assist in the above process and purpose, the IDEAL Center has at its foundation these shared norms (which are always evolving, according to a recent communications with their team):​

Of course, depending on where you are in your journey with racism, cultural understanding, and appropriation, understanding why structures such as the Turn and Learn and Sharing Circles help (especially if the intentionality of these strategies are rooted in awareness) break down the dominant white-culture norms that tend to permeate many organizations across our nation.

​To increase one’s awareness of how white supremacy exists in our communities and organizations, often without individuals even knowing it, is broken down in Tema Okun’s “White Supremacy Culture” article from Dismantling Racism, which was shared by Shavana Talbert, the Statewide Culturally Responsive Practices Technical Assistance Coordinator for the Wisconsin RtI Center. Understanding the imbalance is one of the first steps to creating balance. How might these characteristics show up within you? Your organization?

When it comes to those norms from the IDEAL Center, my personal favorite is the second half of the last one: “what’s learned here leaves here.” Perhaps that’s why I love podcasts so much: there is power in sharing one’s learning and at its root, that’s what podcasting does. Podcasters share their knowledge, while in turn their listeners can share new learning with others. Unlike podcasting, however, Turn and Learn and Sharing Circles are less passive and less presumptive: they create a place for active engagement that leaves room for authentic individuality. (Maybe this is why we at Third Eye are so anxious to try out Clubhouse some day, as it’s a refined version of podcasting: it removes the passivity and presumptiveness. Anyone want to toss us an invite? Let us learn from you!)

Ideas by Shannon Helgeson, Suzette Rowen, Tami Rhea, & Natalia Benjamin (consolidated and framed by Heather M. F. Lyke)

In Adam Grant’s recent Taken for Granted episode, “Jane Goodall on Leadership Lessons from Primates”  (released March 1, 2021), Goodall shares that “at some point in our evolution we developed this way of speaking with words so that we can teach children about things that aren't present. We can gather together and discuss something--people from different views--and that is what I believe led to this explosive development of our intellect.” Likewise, Sir Jony Ive of Apple is often quoted for noting that “the best ideas start as conversations.”

After each session spent recording a new podcast episode, Mike Carolan, Nick Truxal, and I gather together in one of our offices or via a video call, and these follow-ups often begin with a version of the phrase “I learned so much.”

There is a creative energy and a passion for new ideas that often comes from the collaboration and conversation between individuals. For our podcast team, that is what makes the time devoted to our efforts more than worth every minute spent. This is also the root of why our team walked away with so many new ideas and revitalized energy after our discussion with four of Minnesota’s 2021 Teacher of the Year nominees.​

In our conversation with our four Minnesota Teacher of the Year nominees, three threads of focus soon emerged, despite being braided together. We sorted them here:
 
Cultural Exploration and Understanding:
One clear thread that came up during our conversations was a desire to expand one’s personal understanding of bias, racism, and cultures other than one’s own.  Some of the resources shared were:

• Zaragosa Vargas’s book Crucible of Struggle: A History of Mexican Americans from Colonial Times to the Present Era
• Bettina Love’s book We Want to Do More than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom and her Teaching to Thrive podcast that she co-hosts with Chelsey Culley-Love
• Jason Reynolds’ Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You—especially the audio version. 
• Alan Brennert’s Moloka’i​ ​

Instructional Coaching:
Two professionals in the field come up often, including in this conversation, when talking about teacher leadership—specifically in the area of instructional coaching. A portion of our conversation kept circling back to the works of Jim Knight and Elena Aguilar.
 
Inspiration from Outside Education:
It may be hard to believe, but educators do take breaks from time to time—spread our wings outside our field. That said, we never fly too far from the tree of education that roots us to the profession, often discovering ideas and tools that lead us back to the field we love. Such as was found with:

• Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How.
• Scott Ellsworth’s The Secret Game: A Wartime Story of Courage, Change, and Basketball’s Lost Triumph
• Mark Barden’s A Beautiful Constraint: How To Transform Your Limitations Into Advantages, and Why It's Everyone's Business
• Dessa’s memoir Our Own Devices: True Stories from the Road on Music, Science, and Senseless Love
• Carly Israel’s memoir Seconds and Inches

These types of collaborations may happen more organically in our collegial world, seeing as adults have often developed the skills needed to listen, to build off of others, and to see the future potential of a conversational thread. That said, we all learned these skills somewhere.

Rich conversations need to happen in classrooms too. As Goodall noted, it is in conversations where the “explosive development of our intellect” comes into play. There is a thirst for learning that happens naturally and sporadically when we bounce ideas off of each other: in podcast conversations and in classrooms. ​

If you’re looking for ideas for increasing student growth, learning, and passion through conversation collaboration, consider digging into these resources:

• Terry Heick’s Teach Thought article, “20 Types Of Questions For Teaching Critical Thinking”
• Larry Ferlazzo’s Education Week article, “Integrating Critical Thinking Into the Classroom”
• Matt Goldman’s Ted Talk, “The Search for ‘Ah ha’ Moments”

Knowing that “the best ideas start as conversations,” we encourage educators to model conversational learning by participating in these opportunities often, as well as creating a space for such learning in our own schools and classrooms. 

Teachers of the Year
with Shannon Helgeson, Suzette Rowen, Tami Rhea, & Natalia Benjamin | 4.26.2021
We have the pleasure of digging into innovation, inspiration, and influances with four of Minnesota's Teacher of the Year Nominees.

By Gina Meinertz

Globally, educators are seeing a need to change school systems. We believe in the possibilities of equity, all students achieving, and all students graduating ready to contribute to the common good, but we also know there are barriers standing in the way of those beliefs. The hard work to transform our system will not only mean we will need to identify the barriers but that we will also need to find solutions that include more voices and better outcomes. 

Spring Grove Public Schools is on a journey to transform a traditional public school into a culturally relevant learning space that ensures every child confidently uses their passions and strengths to find purpose. To do this work, a team of teachers, students, parents, leaders, and board members created a vision of the 21st Century One Room Schoolhouse with pillars of self-paced curriculum, project-based learning, flexible learning spaces, and real-world learning opportunities. 

Here are some thoughts on how a more traditional system can transform into a student-centered learning environment.

Hidden Voices: Designing A System for All
Spring Grove consistently uses design teams so students, parents, and educators collaborate to envision, prototype, and research the best next steps for our school. We use a series of improvement cycle protocols, including empathy interviews, to hear all voices. When we collect this information, the order of the collection is integral. Unlike most systems, feedback starts with our students so that the adults listen to the voices of the youth before sharing their own perspectives. This ensures the traditional power holders are listening before speaking. We also have a practice of looking at our data from a series of lenses. We start with common themes, and then take a second look purposely searching for hidden voices with concepts from equity design principals intertwined.  If we are missing any stakeholders or groups, we seek out empathy interviews with these individuals. If we are hearing passionate or loud voices, we may use the “5 Whys” technique to find and respond to the root cause. ​

Flexibility: The Students and Families Shape Their Own Success
We know our school system will forever be changing and transforming. This is because Spring Grove offers opportunities and choices to students, parents, and staff members. This relationship of communication and trust has allowed us to continue our healthy transitions, even during a pandemic. 
     
Here are a variety of ways we have been able to use the shifts and stressors of the pandemic to further our advancements in culturally, relevant student-centered learning. 

• Created flexible and multi-purpose spaces in the building and community. Traditionally, schools update spaces with one teacher, subject, or age group in mind.  Instead, we created space to accommodate small and large groups with varying needs and expectations. 
• Thought creatively about learning environments. We questioned tradition while supporting passionate, evidence-based innovations.  
  • Each year our elementary parents and students get choices. They can choose multi-age, single grade, outdoor-focused, and even essential worker classrooms during COVID.  
  • Our culture values lead to relationships that are trauma sensitive and relationship rich. We added staggered entrance times and allow students and teachers to have choice with the environment in which they eat. We may have added these choices to allow individuals to distance, but now appreciate the empowerment and the calm.
  • We learned this saying from friends in Norway, “There is no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing.”  Students ate, learned, played, sang, and wondered outside. Our educators, students, and families support keeping the outdoors an important part of our school system.
• Got students involved with groups of students and organizations from other school systems. We have a group of students active in the Minnesota-Learner Centered Network. These students are empowered with leadership and insight in building improvement processes, scheduling discussions, and other initiates to drive our school’s transformation and success. They are involved in social action at the school and community level ina way that helps them to strive to stay connecting connected.

• With the removal of bells and common passing times the school feels calmer, freer, and less institutional. A system based around freedom and responsibility holds students accountable for their thinking and actions instead of solely for their time. Teachers and students spend more time building trusting relationships and partnerships in learning and less time focusing on compliance.

• We have learned we need to align students with multiple opportunities for support. We help them to identify how to be college, career, and life ready and track their progress toward Redefining Ready National College and Career Readiness Indicators. We know we need to support educators as they hold caring conversations with students. Some of the resources we used to guide this work include Ross Greene’s Plan B discussion guide or questionnaires from Barbara Bray and Kathleen McClaskey's work from How to Personalize Learning, other methods that focus around the Whole Child, and the Ready for Rigor Framework from Zaretta Hammond.  In addition to our advisor support from this year, we hope to add peer mentors and project support teams for students to increase belonging and academic support.

     
Transformational Leadership: A Shift In How We Support Our Vision
Maybe because of the size of our system or maybe because of creative thinking, Rachel Udsuen, our Superintendent, has created a Transformational Leader position that combines Transformational Coaching with Leadership (this is the position I hold).  The primary goal is to break down barriers holding back the vision of culturally relevant, student-centered learning by working with teachers, students, parents, community members, and other staff individually, in small groups, within the community, within the county, and within the state. Another role of this position is to     listen with empathy,  dig for voices that may have been missed, and support everyone interested to achieve desired outcomes. Lastly, the role includes analyzing systems, writing and revising policies, and supporting the system to represent the voices and perspectives of multiple stakeholder groups. 
     
Our goal was to create a setting to support the passions, interests, and individual professional development needs of all adults, so that the adults could in turn implement deeper learning, whole child development and personalized learning experiences for students. As a coach, I personally use experience mapping to storyline the growth and needs of our system as we transform. As a leader, I work with my team using human-centered design and Studor Education to visually transform feedback loops and research into practice in a transparent way.

Place-based Learning in Outdoor Classrooms: An increase in Inquiry & Engagement 
Our educators wanted to find ways for our students to feel safe and engaged in learning during a pandemic, which led us to outdoor learning. We reached out to some friends in Norway at Hoppensprett. They shared how they      started outdoor classrooms with details about how they would instruct, eat, and learn outdoors. This inspiration helped us as we designed three outdoor classrooms in the elementary, a middle school partnership with a city park, and additional outings for many students to prairies, woods, and wetlands. 

Outdoor Classrooms have been such a success from the perspective of our students, teachers, parents, and community members. Students ask more questions, observe with more detail, focus better, and make more connections between learning and life. Projects of learning include but are not limited to the following learning themes:

• Weather Inquiry
  
• ​Studying the people who lived here and how they interacted with the environment over time?

• How cycles and processes of the earth interact     
• Mapping our Park (geometry, fractions, percentiles)
• “I Wonder” Projects
• Engineering 
• Analysis and Creation of Structures
• Forces of Nature (velocity, mean, median, mode, range, and forces)
• Ecosystems/Movement of Animals/Tracking/Habitat
• The History of our Place
• Maple Syrup Study
• Water Testing and Social Action to Keep our Water Clean

The city has supported our efforts by renovating three shelters to create spaces of flexibility where windows can be closed and opened to protect students from the wind and other elements. Our Communications Company gifted the internet to our outdoor shelters. Teachers invite guest speakers frequently to share their experiences and expertise to engage students with authentic and relevant learning. These students will end their year by creating a new outdoor natural reading space for all students in the school. They are organizing funding, designing a log to be transformed into a bench, and planning a native plant garden to surround their reading bench. In years beyond, they plan to increase the native plant populations around the entire school grounds and city.​

Place/Based Learning: Experience Drives Learning
Traditionally, all students in seventh grade and above in Spring Grove functioned with a similar eight-period day schedule. The pandemic brought us to create a middle school pod. The teachers started teaming to create interdisciplinary units of study focused on real-world problems, self-reliance, and collaboration.

The students partnered with the City of Spring Grove to research, plan, and design a park with more native plants and natural spaces. Students learned from an environmental educator about biodiversity, habitat, and prairie plants. Using this knowledge as well as their aesthetic preferences, students designed maps and presentations to share their ideas of how to improve the park with the grant funding. Students shared this with the Mayor and Parks and Recreation committee. They will receive feedback before ordering the plants. The City and students plan to continue this project into the spring so the students can learn about soil preparation and testing, planting conditions, and will in the end complete the project alongside community members. ​

Ideas by Audrey Betcher, compiled by Nick Truxal

This is a fitting quote to begin with, as I don’t remember where I heard it.  As a writer, not crediting my sources is absolutely terrible. (Shouldn’t I just not use it, then?) 

Yet, that is the point—there is more to learn from sharing the quote (failure to cite) than from not sharing the quote (which would have been a success citation-wise). Audrey Betcher shares in her podcast “Building Stronger Communities,” available March 26, 2021 on Third Eye’s podcast, that failure has been important for growing a community willing to tackle difficult situations.  For those unfamiliar, Audrey Betcher is the library director for Rochester Public Libraries, and has been for twenty years.  In that time, she has led her organization to receive the prestigious National Medal for Museum and Library Services award for “significant  and exceptional contributions” to her community.

To achieve this recognition, some of the difficult conversations Betcher needed to facilitate included the exact same types of questions schools are faced with daily. 

• What are we going to do to make this place more welcoming?  
• What would it take to be a more equitable organization? 
• How do we define our place in this community?  

In order to answer these questions, though, she needed to create an environment that celebrated risk taking, openness, collaboration, and indeed, failure.

One of the many things Betcher did in order to help build the capacity of her community to be collaborative, open, and willing to take risks was to celebrate each of these traits. She did so by inventing the following three awards.

1 | The Collaboration Award
An award that celebrates not the outcome of a collaboration but rather the quality of collaboration that occurred.

2 | The Cliffjumper Award
This award is a celebration of taking risks.  Though this tilts towards the successful, it certainly is a great set-up for our third award.
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3 | The Heroic Failure Award
“Where we just totally fail, but yay!  The things that come out of the heroic failure award morph into something so much better than we could ever imagine,” Betcher stated in our podcast conversation.

More specifically—focusing on education, there are a few applications to be made.  First, of course, is having something akin to these awards in our school or in our own classrooms.  Next, however, is the application to Carol Dweck’s work on growth mindset, which may include tools such as “My Favorite No” or “The Robert Frost Technique.”

There is a lot of research available that demonstrates the failures of a growth mindset, and if we want to learn and grow from failure, we must keep these in mind as well.  The primary issue with the growth mindset has been in terms of a focus on outcomes rather than a focus on process.  Dweck, the leading voice on growth mindset, has spoken many times on this trouble spot, which she sums it up in her article for The Atlantic by saying, “The whole idea of growth-mindset praise is to focus on the learning process. When you focus on effort, [you have to] show how effort created learning progress or success.”

As educators, it’s often important to remember that we must make room for failure, appreciate it, even celebrate it to grow. Keeping that in mind, let’s lean into this failed quote one more time:

If we wrap failure in awards, community, collaboration, openness, and a growth mindset together, our students and staff will all be “hoping for a failure,” according to a source uncited.