Learning: Problems and Solutions
'It Has Everything To Do With Them'

Place-based learning helps South Dakota students connect their classroom to their community.

Students in Mary Stangohr's English class at Howard High School are reading The Jungle, Upton Sinclair's exposé about the nation's meatpacking industry. Like any good English teacher, Stangohr reviews the traditional topics: content, theme, tone, symbolism. But the lesson doesn't end here. Stangohr stimulates a class discussion about the hamburger students eat for lunch and the discussion expands based on their interests.

Inevitably, the discussion leads to the question that plagues high school students everywhere: So what does this have to do with me? The answer is especially significant for Stangohr's students, most of whom come from farming families in this rural South Dakota county. Students ask questions about cattle prices and livestock feed and the reasons their families work multiple jobs to make a living wage.

"They find out very quickly it has everything to do with them," Stangohr says.

Incorporating the local community into a lesson isn't just a choice. It's a well-planned teaching strategy known as place-based learning. The approach involves students in real work that identifies and solves real community problems. Through place-based learning, students develop a sense of civic duty and an appreciation for where they live. At the same time, their work meets a local need and strengthens the connection between the school and community.

"Rural schools in rural communities function together," Stangohr says. "Without the school, the community dies. It's pretty much the heartbeat and lifeblood of the small, small communities like Howard."

The magnitude of the projects varies. Stangohr's students write biographies about local women, while science students provide water testing to a local fish farm. Meanwhile, business students initiated a campaign to increase local spending. The students' efforts yielded $15 million in new revenue.

"Students have a valuable place in the community, and I think that's what's really stressed in place-based learning," says 18-year-old Kay Schwader, a senior in Stangohr's class. "It doesn't just help the community. It helps students realize they are an important part of the community."

The flight of young people is one of the great challenges rural areas face, says Elaine Roberts, president of the South Dakota Education Association. Place-based education is one way rural educators hope to keep their best and brightest students close to home.

"You educate your kids to go some-place else to live the good life," Roberts says. "Place-based education helps young people see how they can live the good life in this rural community. The implementation and sustained effort in a program like this could help stop the out migration."

The approach also shows community members they must play a role in the lives of their young people if the community is going to survive, Roberts says.

The Rural School and Community Trust, a nonprofit education agency, works with about 700 schools in 35 states on place-based learning programs. By building up the schools, the program builds up the communities, says Dorothy Williams, director of capacity building for the Trust.

"In rural communities, many times the school is the only public facility and it holds the greatest resources," Williams says. "So we have to help the schools grow and get better and connect that growth and development to the growth of the community."

At the same time, though, place-based learning does not overlook mandated content standards, Williams says.

SDEA's Roberts admits that new federal testing mandates will strain some place-based programs, because the strategy takes a broader approach to instruction. But Stangohr at Howard High School believes the two strategies can co-exist.

"Am I concerned about content standards? Yes I am, but you can do place-based learning and still achieve your standards," Stangohr says. "We're very mindful of the testing, but we're not going to quit doing this. This is good teaching."

--Kristen Loschert

For more: Visit the Rural School and Community Trust at www.ruraledu.org.

Dilemma
How do you stop kids from teasing?

For this activity you need a tube of toothpaste and construction paper. Tell the students that the toothpaste represents hurtful words and the construction paper is the person to whom the words are directed. Ask a volunteer to squeeze the toothpaste on the construction paper. Then ask the volunteer to put the toothpaste back in the tube just as easily. They can't! The lesson is that words easily come out of our mouths, but once they come out, you cannot take them back.

Roxanne Hendricks
Fifth grade teacher
Orlando, Florida

I make sure everyone knows the consequences for teasing, and what to do if they are being teased. Several times during the year I ask test essay questions such as, "What should you do when someone teases you and hurts your feelings?" These questions allow me to evaluate each student's understanding about the rule, while also allowing me to reinforce it.

Pamela Galus
High school earth science teacher
Omaha, Nebraska

We had a large forum about bullying and also broke into teams. One team watched stories about bullying followed by discussion. Another group talked about threatening scenarios and developed positive strategies to deal with those experiences. Each child gave a summary about what he or she learned.

Carl Frels
Elementary math teacher
Scranton, Pennsylvania

In my classroom guidance sessions I teach students that teasing is caused by low self-esteem. Teasers do not like themselves and try to make themselves feel better by making others feel bad. This approach makes the students teased feel better because they learn that teasing is not about them. I also work with the teasers to emphasize that others know why they tease and to help them to see their own attributes.

Florence Woods
School counselor
Nashville, Tennessee

From day one I tell my students that my room is a "safe room," where people can express their ideas freely without fear of teasing or negative criticism.

They may laugh WITH another student but not AT another student. Because they want a place in school where they can be free to express themselves without teasing, they actually police themselves and keep each other in line and tease-free!

Arlen Kimmelman
High school language arts teacher
Seabrook, New Jersey

I teach eighth grade language arts and maintain a "zero-tolerance policy" regarding ridicule, teasing, mockery, and expressed racism. When I catch students teasing someone I ask them to stand and repeat what they said "for the whole class to enjoy." If students say they don't remember what they said, I ask them to remain standing until they do remember or to apologize to the person they teased. The method degrades no one, and functions as an effective deterrent to future offenses.

Bret H. Hart
Eighth grade language arts teacher
Eden, North Carolina

Got an Answer?
How do you get students to ask good questions?

E-mail your answer to dilemma2@list.nea.org. Or send by regular mail, or fax to 202/822-7206. Include your name, city, state, and job title. If published, you will receive an NEA Today mug!

Idea Exchange

Student Helpers
I was amazed to learn my students wanted to help me with more jobs in the classroom, so I created a list of 30 jobs for my students. Some jobs are as simple as plugging in lamps, answering the door, feeding the fish, and finding my clipboard when I need it. Some are more complicated like recording the sunrise and sunset or the high and low temperatures and starting or shutting down the computers. Because they keep the job for a semester they create the habit of remembering the job without any reminders and they are saving me loads of time and energy!

Marilyn Van Bael
Chesterfield, Michigan

Overhead Sentences
I use the overhead to have students arrange words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs. I type the words on the computer using a large font, print them on a transparency, and then cut up the sentences. When students are able to move the words around on the overhead and the class can see what's going on, they pay attention. Sentence strips can be used in the same manner.

To modify for younger students, you could use letters to make words or show a picture and have the students give the correct word.

Maggie Harder
Lillington, North Carolina

Weekly Behavior Report
To keep parents informed of their child's progress and behavior, I send a Weekly Behavior Report home each Monday.

The report has a box for each day in which I document both positive and negative behaviors and any grades the student has earned that week.

I also note any special assignments.

The parents must sign the report and send it back to school.

The weekly report not only informs the parents, it's also good documentation for me.

Maryellen Eaves
Louisville, Mississippi

Learning: Problems and Solutions
Why Do We Have Seasons?

Taking advantage of curiosity and misconceptions.

Students do say the darndest things and middle-school science teachers like Tawny Alvarado in Lansing, Michigan and Diane Mason in Hudson, Massachusetts have heard it all.

Pre-assessment is critical to uncovering misconceptions, says Alvarado, who uses these mixed-up notions to guide her teaching and get her sixth graders at Otto Middle School back on track. Several years ago, she and other educators in Lansing watched A Private Universe, a video produced by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astro-physics, which shows new Harvard graduates, professors, and a group of ninth graders all offering their own, almost always erroneous, explanations for questions as basic as, "Why is summer hotter than winter?" Intended as a professional development tool, the video says educators need to free students from their private theories before new knowledge can take hold.

Alvarado agrees and starts new units with "mind-stretchers" in which students write down everything they know about a question she poses. "I get a lot of blank looks at first," she says.

Discussion brings forth answers--and misunderstandings--and then Alvarado sees the direction the lesson needs to take. "You won't know what they're thinking if you don't probe," she says.

When she discovered many students thought the blood coursing through their veins was blue, Alvarado asked those who'd had blood drawn to describe its color as it flowed into the test tube. Laden with carbon dioxide, that dark red substance is certainly a different shade than the familiar bright red, oxygen-rich blood oozing from a cut. But, the class realized, it's not blue.

The strange, half-true, or humorous scientific thinking that students bring to middle school has remained fairly predictable during her time in the classroom, Alvarado says. "But the way teachers address these misconceptions has changed."

Hundreds of miles to the east at John F. Kennedy Middle School, Mason, an educator for 18 years, says she's still amazed whenever she watches the Private Universe video. "It made me aware that all kids, even the brightest, have these ideas embedded in their minds, and trying to change them is difficult." But she's hopeful that her approach will give students a better chance of answering such science questions correctly if videotaped at their college graduations.

'Gee, I wrote that?'
Like Alvarado, Mason uses writing for pre-assessment. "It helps kids sort out their thoughts and gives them a record of what they were thinking--something they can return to and say, 'Gee, I wrote that?'" Then they either revise their initial statements or take pride in how right they were from the start.

Each year her students study the moon in depth, keeping a month-long journal filled with their observations, questions, drawings and discoveries. "The moon's phases are very hard for both children and adults to understand," says Mason. It's not uncommon, she explains, to find a student believing that somehow the moon gets recreated each month. "Students need to comprehend that there's a round moon out there all the time and when you just see a piece of it, the rest isn't gone."

Hands-on activities fill both teachers' classrooms, helping students visualize the correct scientific concepts.

Minute by minute changes
Ongoing assessment through discussion, reflective writing, projects, and testing are essential, says Alvarado, who's taught for 16 years. She and her colleagues receive extensive training through their school's partnership with Michigan State University. Although sticking to her objectives, she's learned to change her direction, sometimes minute by minute.

Matthew Schneps, the astrophysicist who co-produced A Private Universe, says he's still surprised at its wide circulation. Originally intended for a target audience of 3,000 high school astronomy teachers, the video has racked up a half-million sales with untold copies floating around.

Its popularity may have spawned "lots of misconceptions about misconceptions," he says. "People think you have to stamp them out or otherwise a student's thinking is poisoned." Instead, he says, "work with them."

That advice holds true across a variety of disciplines.

"Kids come up with amazing explanations--it's a sign of human intelligence," says Schneps. A child who is curious will naturally develop misconceptions. "It's what happens when you put a logical thinker in touch with limited information."

Teachers should view it as a signal that a child is ready to get more information, he says. Then, they can bridge the gap from where a child is to the correct information.

"Children's lives are filled with fanciful activities," he says. When he's reading a picture book with his children and comes across a child perched on top of a crescent moon, he wonders, "Should I give a scientific explanation for why that's not possible or should we just read and enjoy the story?

"We just enjoy it," he laughs.

For more: Check out http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/cfa/sed/resources/privateuniv.html and follow links to the Annenberg/CPB Channel, which broadcasts the Private Universe Project workshops.

Dilemma
How do you deal with chronic absentees?

Our school uses a monthly attendance reward system. The names of perfect attendance students are put in a drawing for each grade. The prize is a ball of the student's choice.

We give a trophy to the class with the best attendance of the month. Also, classes with ten days of perfect attendance get an ice pop party. Fifty days gets them pizza and a movie, and 75 days gets them a free trip. No student wants to be responsible for the class losing out. It sounds expensive, but so are lost days when we don't receive funding.

For chronically absent students, parents are held liable and we go the legal route.

Jacqueline Pavesi
Fourth grade teacher
Los Angeles, California

I have a phone in my room and routines that the students do first thing, while I take attendance and make calls. Often, the absent student answers! The best part is, the other students hear the reminder about the importance of coming to school. It works great!

Michelle Beerbower
Alternative education teacher
Holt, Michigan

Often, the attendance clerk comes to me for information on a student who is absent a lot. As a school nurse, I may have referred the student to medical care or talked with the parent about a medical-behavior concern.

I also check the daily absent list and give the clerk information that might be helpful, keeping in mind confidentiality. When the absence goes longer than is reasonable, I phone the parent and ask if I can help. This is less intrusive than a call from the clerk. Sometimes it works, and sometimes not!

I also contact the health care provider, who often has no idea the student is still using a medical excuse. Many chronically absent students have been recovered this way.

Mary Kathryn Myers
School nurse
Kent, Washington

Many students develop a fear of school, sometimes from homesickness or being picked on. Educators need to get the parents involved. They can help figure out the problem and help the child feel more comfortable about school.

Educators also need to get that child involved in fun activities at school. This can develop friendships and give the child more self-esteem. Put the student in charge of the class pet, or help the student join the basketball team. If it is an academic problem, have a peer tutor the student, help the parents so that they can aid their child in academics, or even arrange to help the student yourself.

Jocelyn Hardy
Education student
Clarion, Pennsylvania

A student isn't chronically absent just because he or she feels like it. The myth of kids playing hooky and going down to the fishing hole is just that--a myth. There are much more serious problems when a student is out.

I had a boy who had two pairs of pants. One had a small hole in the thigh no bigger than a pea, but to him it was huge. When he had to wear those pants, he wouldn't come to school. We bought him a few pairs of pants. He was never out again except for sickness, and became a model student.

We have building-based "swat" teams: a psychologist, a social worker, a health care professional, an attendance officer, a teacher, and an administrator. When a trigger goes off (such as absenteeism), the team gets on the case immediately.

Services used to be housed all over the district and it took a long time to communicate. Meanwhile, the student was missing school and in a revolving door that included the courts. We are the most densely populated city in the country and have a very transient population. But with this approach, we are running around 95 percent attendance.

Richie Malizia
Attendance officer
Union City, New Jersey

Got an Answer?
How do you handle a student who threatens you?

E-mail your answer to dilemma2@list.nea.org. Or send by regular mail, or fax to 202/822-7206. Include your name, city, state, and job title. If published, you will receive an NEA Today mug!

TestYour Knowledge

It's not just kids--most grown-ups don't know some basic things about nature because ideas they picked up as kids got in the way of what they were taught later.

1. Why is summer hotter than winter?
   1. The sun gives off more heat in the summer.
   2. The earth is closer to the sun.
   3. The sun is higher in the sky and days are longer.
2. Why does the moon have phases?
   1. As the moon orbits the earth, we see different amounts of the Moon's sunlit side.
   2. The moon passes in and out of the earth's shadow.
   3. The moon passes in and out of the sun's shadow.
3. Can a cat see in a totally dark room?
   Yes.
   No.

4. When an acorn grows into a giant oak, where does the wood come from?

   1. Mostly from the soil.
   2. Mostly from water.
   3. Mostly from air.

For More:
On summer vs. winter and phases of the moon, see www.learner.org/teacherslab/pup. The wood and seeing-in-the-dark questions are discussed in Private Universe teacher workshops two and five. See www.learner.org/channel/workshops/privuniv.