ARLINGTON – Field trips have been a favorite diversion for young students who anxiously count the days for the rare chance to learn outside of the classroom, away from computer screens and whiteboards.
For grownups, a recent field trip offered much the same lessons, but unlike their younger counterparts, the goal of this tour was to go into the classroom, to see learning in real time.
As part of Arlington Public Schools’ “Know Our Schools” tour, parents, community members and administrators boarded a bus and visited a handful of schools on Wednesday, including Post Middle School, Kent Prairie Elementary and Arlington High School.
The tour doubled as an opportunity to give the two dozen in attendance a glance at building projects in the upcoming school bond and a firsthand look at some of the facilities that would undergo replacement, or renovation and security improvements that the bond would cover.
Participants in the Byrnes Performing Arts Center fueled up with handmade scones, muffins and breakfast fare presented by the high school’s culinary arts students before venturing out to see how students are achieving in the classroom.
First stop: Post Middle School.
Post would be completely replaced with a new secure and self-contained school to do away with too much building-to-building walking if the bond is approved by voters, but on this day, it was another beehive day of busy learning.
Guided by student leaders, the “tour groups” stopped in at teacher Rebecca Ostrom’s STEM math class where teams of seventh-graders were tasked with solving real-world equations related to the distance they were able to throw their own paper airplanes. Students also used critical thinking to figure out what they could have done differently to get their planes to travel farther.
In Janli Weston’s Advanced English Language Arts class, eighth-graders were studying The Holocaust in the context of how people and society choose to remember the past. While some kids did the assignment on paper, others typed theirs online on checked out laptops, and annotated their notes.
Among classrooms at Kent Prairie Elementary, tour groups listened in on teacher Nikki Brooks’ Kindergardeners study math using the Number Talks curriculum developed by a leading educator Ruth Parker, which is in use among K-3rd graders. The lessons posits students need to recognize mathematical relationships and use them to make sense of information, situations and problems. With her students seated on the floor around her, Brooks had them tell her how many dots – 10 – were drawn up on the board like on a domino. She drove the discussion with questions like “how did you figure that out?” and “Why did you add it up that way?”
Assistant Principal Colleen Van belle said the training was adapted for their classrooms. “I think it’s working really well.”
Van belle said when the students have mastered numbers at the end of the school year, they will start to fit them into everyday conversations about things like food and money, which is just what educators want to see.
At Arlington High School, participants visited the schools cavernous foyer to illustrate why security improvements are being sought in the proposed bond, along with new classrooms. The main school entrance would be fortified to be more like walking into an airport check-in area than the wide open shopping mall that it currently is when the student crowds meet inside to eat and wander.
Woe be to the student manager and his stage hands in Drama teacher Scott Moberly’s class. The performing arts center and classroom are in a great location to support the arts, but the shop where stage pieces and backgrounds are built and stored is hundreds-of-feet walk away outside in an entirely different part of the campus. Some set pieces need to be rolled or carried from one place to the other along the school’s service road. The bond would relocate the work and storage area to the backside of the performing arts center.
Ralph and Sharron Knutson, active longtime residents and graduates of the old high school, said they appreciated the opportunity stop in to the classrooms.
“It was a good tour,” Ralph said. “We appreciate their efforts. The teachers are definitely into teaching.”
Superintendent Chrys Sweeting said she hoped that participants came away with more vivid impressions of how education looks today.
“My hope is that they saw and they heard the good learning that is taking place in Arlington schools,” Sweeting said. “They saw the learning, but they also saw some of the needs that we have for the upcoming bond.”
