On the desk of Professor Amy Masko (English) sits a mugꟷa gift from a studentꟷproclaiming, “I’m a teacher.  What’s your superpower?”  

The recent $15M Kellogg Foundation grant for which Jean Nagelkerk (Vice Provost for Health) and Paula Lancaster (College of Education) are principle investigators has opened the door for some fascinating curricular experiments in Battle Creek.  Amy took on the role of mentoring three years of curriculum development and implementation to embed best practices, research-based pedagogy, and increased teacher capacity at the STEM Innovation Center, a Battle Creek middle school (grades 6-8).

The students are diverse, and the class size is about 24 students in each of the three classes.  Amy is hopeful that this will become a great place for our student teachers to be placed.

“There are quite a few initiatives,” Amy explains. “There's a teacher mentor program; teachers get some graduate credit opportunities. I got involved in this project through our Regional Math and Science Center.  Kris Pachla [Director of the RMSC] manages the STEM school part of the grant.  Mathematics faculty Paul Yu and Lisa Kasmer, science faculty Janet Vigna (BIO/Integrated Science) and Julie Henderleiter (CHM/Integrated Science) are also involved.  We work with three Battle Creek teachers in science, math,  English language arts, and social studies.  They also are quickly learning to teach coding, STEM, and engineering projects in problem-solving.  My role is to support the ELA/Social Studies teacher in particular.”

Amy calls this the most challenging work because it involves starting a school and writing all of the curriculum with teachers on the go—but she notes that it is also the most fun.

 

“There are four to five units per grade level, which are thematic with a project or a problem guiding each unit.  We just finished the last eight lessons and I wanted to teach them!  It’s so exciting what the students will be learning.  I’ll go down to Battle Creek once or twice a unit [an hour-and-a-half drive].”

 

The interdisciplinary lens of this math, science, engineering, social studies and language arts has proved to be a lot of fun.  Coding has been part of the instruction every day and the STEM class has built skills the students will use in their project/problem-based assignments.

 

“The students tackle big questions such as “Is the electoral college a good thing or not?” and look at how census data matters, or they look at climate change impacting populations and migrations, or they take on a transport engineering topic about moving people.  They make their choices and then work in groups to identify their audience, make their plan, and express their outcomes in ways such as a TED talk-style video or a poster presentation.”

 

A depth of knowledge is attained in these themed units.  For instance, a unit designed around the idea of movement has a project on the census.  Students “build” a city using real statistics.  They use “coins” to represent costs which are tied to population.  They see the tradeoffs between competing needs for infrastructure such as hospitals, police stations, etc.  In math, they graph these challenges.  In science, they look at how climate change impacts movement of people, which impacts where people live, and hence how many hospitals, schools, and police stations a community might need. The interdisciplinary connections are deep.

 

Amy is in awe of the tech that they have to work with.  Jamboards, an interactive whiteboard developed by Google, are connected to their Chromebooks, so students can easily project their work up on the big screens as they work in groups.  “It is some of the best tech in schools in the country,” Amy explains.

 

The three-year project to build this cutting-edge curriculum and implement it is accompanied by one-on-one support of the teachers.  For instance, Amy speaks with the social studies teacher weekly.  “In three years, she’ll be on her own.  She’ll get completely away from the shrink-wrapped curriculum that has become ubiquitous.  She and I and the rest of the team are building her curriculum from scratch. The teachers are challenged in this process because they like to have all their lessons done up front, but we have scrapped the old stuff and are making a place-based curriculum with relevance to Battle Creek.  For instance, they’re looking at The Bottoms, a local neighborhood that has historically experienced flooding, they are looking at the history of Battle Creek, and they are doing it in a connected, integrated approach.  This year we concentrate on the 6^th grade, then we move on to 7^th and then 8^th.  We are thinking about how all this connects around the broad themes.  It’s really fantastic.”

 

Students who go through this program will have the opportunity to go on to high school at Battle Creek Central (where there are the Health Academies, a part of the other WKKF/GVSU work) or the Battle Creek Area Math and Science Center.

 

Amy has high praise for the principal Susan Basso, the three teachers, the secretaries, engineering consultant and paraprofessionals who are essential to the work.  GVSU contributed two student employees as part of the grant.  Ashly Latham, an English Language Arts student and mathematics major, Devan Washington, contribute about 150 hours of work per semester to the project.

 

“They help us align with the standards in all the units so that none are missed.,” Amy explains.  “They are learning a lot.”

 

Meanwhile, Amy is able to contribute to the professional development of the teachers by offering workshops on topics such as literature circles (like a structured book club which encourages rigorous discussion).

 

Students at Grand Valley will benefit from the exciting case studies that these classrooms represent.  This grand experiment will help them rethink the integration of language arts in the curriculum and allow for richer future collaborations with many benefits from co-development of curriculum that has a multicultural, social justice lens.