When Cheryl Putnam, principal of Leverett Elementary School in Fayetteville, began trying to recruit parents to participate in the process of helping the school achieve the designation of an Arkansas “School of Innovation,” it wasn’t an easy sell.
“We were offering everything but free rent to get them to come in at first,” Putnam said. “But the more focus groups we had with parents, the more people were excited to come in.”
“That was one of the most interesting, eye-opening things we were able to do,” Putnam said. “As educators, we come up with great ideas together, but they’re all along the same lines. But parents all have different experiences.”
The decision to pursue the designation came after more than a year of considering making Leverett a conversion charter school, said Putnam, one of about 20 education and industry professionals asked to speak at Tuesday’s “Eye to the Future: Education, Youth, and the Economy” conference at the University of Arkansas Global Campus in Rogers.
About 110 people registered to attend the conference, said Elizabeth Smith, director of the university’s Education Renewal Zone project.
The Leverett school leadership ultimately decided against pursuing the conversion charter in favor of trying for a School of Innovation designation.
When Leverett’s staff members began assessing needs for the school’s diverse student population about six years ago, they realized they weren’t serving the students at either end of the performance continuum well, Putnam said.
“We had some students that were at the top of the charts, and they weren’t moving,” Putnam said. “And we had some students that were struggling, and they weren’t moving. We kept teaching to the middle.”
After receiving input from parents, her staff decided to focus on grouping students by their “instructional needs,” noting that both parents and educators are often aghast at the idea of “ability grouping.”
“But that’s not really what it was” Putnam said. “They may have been really high-achieving students, but the way that their learning style was, they needed really slow instruction. They needed some things that were on a concrete level. So we started looking at different groups of students and moving at their own pace.”
Act 601 provides for “Schools of Innovation” to seek waivers from the constraints of a district or state requirement. Immediately after the act passed in 2013, Putnam said, she began receiving emails and phone calls from parents and educators encouraging her and other administrators to pursue the designation.
Adjustments to the teaching model at Leverett led to the decision to begin implementing an increasing focus on science, technology, engineering and math curriculum — commonly referred to as STEM, Putnam said.
In January 2013, the University of Arkansas College of Education and Health Professions began its Office of Innovation with a $171,240 grant from the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation and additional funding from the Arkansas Department of Education. As part of the college’s efforts to advance STEM education at the elementary education level, education students began working with teachers to develop and implement project- and problem-based lesson plans for Leverett students, said Michael K. Daugherty, professor of Technology Education and department head for the Department of Curriculum and Instruction.
Although STEM is typically associated with the kind of advanced math and science that students aren’t likely to encounter until high school, Daugherty said that waiting until a student is a teenager to get him interested in STEM is a mistake.
“The research repeatedly shows that children make their decisions about whether they like science, are good at science, and if they like math, are good at math, by about the fourth grade,” Daugherty said. “By the time they’ve reached middle school, they’ve already decided, ‘I don’t like math. I don’t like science. I’m not good at it.’
“So, how do we change that dynamic? Well, you change that dynamic by changing the teachers and changing the experiences the students in elementary school have, so you can keep those students engaged throughout their academic career,” Daugherty said. “And there’s a better chance that they end up in those advanced-placement high school courses that they’re not ending up in now.”
Lindsey Swagerty, a doctoral candidate at the College of Education, was among the first cohort of UA students to participate in the STEM program with Leverett Elementary School.
“There’s a level of excitement in the students you see when they know we’re coming in to do a STEM lesson, and they don’t even know what we’re going to do that day,” Swagerty said.
There are currently about 20 UA education students working with the Leverett STEM project, Smith said.
Swagerty said the process of working with professional educators to introduce STEM concepts into the elementary classroom has also provided her and her fellow university students opportunities to learn about the real-world problems of implementing lesson plans in the classroom.
“It’s nice as a pre-service teacher, because you feel like you’re able to share something with the classroom teachers, but then they’re able to share with you the more inside experience of the classroom dynamics,” Swagerty said. “We can give them STEM content and walk them through design challenges, but they are able to supply us with the realistic information we’re going to need to be an effective teacher once we’re done with our program as well.”
Cathy Wissehr, professor of Science and STEM Education, said that since the initial batch of 12 education students went through the STEM implementation program in the spring 2013, interest has “exploded,” with about 45 students wanting to join for the fall 2014.
Earlier this week, administrators at Leverett Elementary School received notice from the Department of Education that it has been officially designated as an Arkansas “School of Innovation.” The department received applications from 118 schools across the state for the designation, and 10 were awarded the designation.