In the first portion of our interview with Talladega County superintendent Dr. Suzanne Lacey, she offered the background story of Winterboro School’s shift to project based, inquiry driven learning. In Part 2, she describes what the new instructional model looks like in more detail and the steps she and her leadership team are taking to spread PBL across all the district’s schools.
Norton: You’ve said that a lot of Talladega County’s success in developing a new instructional model can be traced back to your partnership with the Buck Institute. I know the Institute is nationally known for its professional training around project based learning. At their website, they offer this description:
In Project Based Learning (PBL), students go through an extended process of inquiry in response to a complex question, problem, or challenge. Rigorous projects help students learn key academic content and practice 21st Century Skills (such as collaboration, communication & critical thinking).
How did you get involved with Buck?
Lacey: As we were doing our PBL homework several years ago, we kept
coming across the work of the Buck Institute. We learned about their dedication to providing educators training on how to deliver instruction in new and different ways. We simply called them and said “this is what we’re doing – we would like for you to come and be a part of this. We want you to lead our training in project based learning.”
It’s been a good partnership. They’ve provided some really great presenters and consultants for us to learn from. At this point, Craig Bates is ready to serve in the role of PBL trainer and this fall he’s been training additional people in our school system. He’s at the point where he can help teachers become effective in this kind of instruction. He’s not an official Buck trainer, but he has a lot of everyday real life experience after leading our efforts for three years.
Norton: Help our readers understand how this new approach to instruction is different from what we’ve been calling “traditional” in our conversation.
Lacey: The instructional model at Winterboro today is very collaborative in nature. It is cohesive — there’s a strong foundation underlying the way we teach and it’s consistent across the entire school. It is systematic, even though it is not traditional. We have teachers who are co-teaching subjects — for example, English 9 and English 10 teachers collaborating and teaching together. It is engaging; it is appealing and it is motivating students to reach higher levels.
The kids lead their own learning, and I think that’s the most powerful message that you come away with when you actually visit Winterboro School. It’s how students have taken responsibility for their own learning, and how they can articulate what they are learning and why they’re learning it. Before the shift, there was no context for that, whatsoever. They were not sharing in a common understanding about why we are here in this school or what learning should be about — what our shared purposes are.
Our students are able to talk deeply about their own learning because they have responsibility for what they’re doing — they’ve make choices in assignments, they work in teams. They help to design the work they do, I guess you might say. And once again, the relevance of the work that they’re doing now connects them to each other and to the whole learning enterprise in ways that they had never experienced before these changes came about. And as a result, they’re more eager and interested — they’re coming early to school, they’re staying late — it’s given them a zest for learning.
And I think most importantly this student ownership of learning has given them a vision for what’s going on in the world. In a rural community, many of our students never leave the area after they graduate from high school. They stay here. Now they have a greater understanding of what’s out there and a wider vision of what’s possible, what opportunities might await them in the larger world.
Some of them may go out and learn and grow and bring what they’ve gained back home and do great things in our own community. We need that. I think that we’ve really changed the game in that regard. I just don’t think there was much vision for the future among many of our students prior to giving them this sense of ownership in their own futures.
Norton: Could you talk me through an example of a learning experience — how it looks like now compared to how it might have looked before?
Lacey: Learning in the past was very traditional in nature, with a textbook and a notebook. The teacher giving notes, the student taking notes. At the end of the chapter or the week, they would have a quiz or a test. There was no actual attempt to make much connection between what they were learning in the classroom and what might be going on in the real world. Now students have opportunities to do research, to collaborate, to work in teams on problems that have a real world context. They’re much more likely to make meaning out of the work they do.
For example, one of the history classes last year did a 1920’s Museum — an interactive museum where the auditorium was set up with various learning stations and the students were costumed in the dress of the era. Each station was manned by our students and presented some important aspect of life in that period between World War I and the Great Depression. They also had to utilize technology to present their findings from their research. They had to do writing assignments.
And most important, all of this was built around the curriculum standards that we expect student learning to encompass. Utilizing our Alabama state standards and integrating them into challenging, engaging projects is a phenomenal way to teach. They see so much more purpose and meaning in the things we ask them to learn.
In the last couple of years, we’ve had guests from all over the state of Alabama and beyond come to see what we are doing. This creates opportunities for our students to have the experience of presenting their work to authentic audiences. That’s huge. Because again, that builds confidence, that gives them opportunities for public speaking that they need to be able to do and do well once they leave us. It says to them that what they are learning and doing matters.
The greatest message about what we’re doing comes from our students — hearing students tell about a typical day — and how it used to be compared to how it is now.
Norton: So students are eager to come to school every day.
Lacey: Absolutely. During my first year as superintendent, I went around to every high school and participated in student forums. I asked the same 10 questions to groups of 20 kids at each school. I wanted to see what trends I might uncover.
The overwhelming message was Boredom.
Now, thinking back three years ago and remembering what the Winterboro students said then and what they say now — it is clear that they’ve gone through a life-changing experience. And not just the students — all of us. It is the most life-changing experience I’ve had in my educational career, in 28 years.
The culture of the school is so different. It’s a culture of trust and collaboration, among the students, among the teachers and in the relationship between students and teachers. And again, that’s because we had to give up some control and give responsibility to our students in order for them to believe they were truly partners in this thing we call school.
The students often refer to each other as “colleagues” — again, we’re modeling the work environment. The first time I heard a student say something about their “colleague”, I wondered “how do you even know that word?” But they really have come to understand the work environment and its dynamics and how one refers to fellow workers. The students talk a lot about professionals vs. amateurs. No student at Winterboro High wants to be known as having “amateur behavior.” Of course it may happen now and then, but the constant talk is about building capacity for leadership, professionalism — that’s in their dialogue every day.
Norton: All this description of engaged students and greater learning begs the question: how are you spreading the transformative teaching and learning process that Winterboro is experiencing to all your district schools?
Lacey: Of course at the same time we’re creating Winterboro, we can’t forget about all our other schools. Let me say something about what we’re learning at Winterboro to help me answer your question.
It is hard work for our teachers to teach this way. It’s hard in the sense that the expectations are high and the kind of teaching we’re asking them to do is challenging to manage — it requires so much planning. One thing none of us have enough of is Time. And during the course of a day, in a small school like Winterboro, teachers have multiple preparations. They may be teaching English 9, English 10, English 11 and they may be teaching something else as well. In a project learning environment, all these different preps represent a big investment of planning time.
It’s a real challenge, but we have to manage it. We don’t have teacher units beyond what we are awarded by the state, so we have to make do with the teachers we have. We can’t budget for four English teachers in high school — we have two. And we have two math teachers. In the traditional model, a math teacher goes in the room, closes the door, follows the Course of Study, and that’s their day. But at Winterboro the expectations are higher than that, and the time it takes to develop quality projects and lead students through the inquiry learning process — the extra support that kind of learning requires — it is significant.
It requires much more diligence and effort to do fully engage students in the learning process like this. And even though this is a young, committed staff, they can’t help but be aware that the teacher down the road in a traditional school setting has two preps, closes the door and teaches, and that’s it.
We are determined to spread this concept throughout the district. Many of our own educators in other schools have visited Winterboro and they see great things. And yet, the commitment and the time and the effort and the planning it takes to do this is phenomenal. So that is a challenge for me. Another challenge is that we don’t have the funds to provide the technology at the same level. I can’t outfit Fayetteville School like I’ve outfitted Winterboro, at least at this point. I just economically cannot do that.
I also think that a school’s culture has to change to support a project based approach to learning. That’s a piece we’re still working on across the district in all of our high schools. Because that had to change at Winterboro first, immediately, for us to make this much progress this quickly. It’s about both expectations for staff and expectations for students.
Students have to change too, you know. The Winterboro students had to learn new ways of being students — they had to become comfortable with this new way, which expected them to take a lot more responsibility for their educational experience. There were growing pains for the students, but I must say they very quickly acclimated, which speaks to the excitement for learning a PBL driven curriculum can create.
Norton: Is this strictly a high school effort at this point? I know Winterboro has grades 5-12.
Lacey: It reaches all the way to 5th grade, and the early grades at Winterboro are really coming on strong. We are beginning to work across the district to build capacity at the elementary level for this type of learning. So when students do get to middle school and high school it will be customary to work in teams, customary to work on projects — that the PBL approach to learning becomes a way of life in school.
For elementary as well as high school students, the project based concept is, I think, an engaging strategy. It’s not just something we do in February or May. Project based learning is best practice, a powerful strategy that needs to be embedded in the curriculum. It can’t be a stand-alone activity. And that’s what we’re working on a lot in elementary.
It’s safe to say that project based learning is a district-wide initiative that we’ve really focused on the last three years. I’ve seen great work with our little students and how they’re taking ownership of their learning and becoming more effective communicators. And our elementary schools are involving their communities more as partners in student projects.
Norton: So you’re now moving to engage faculty across the district in this instructional change. How is that rolling out?
Lacey: Initially, back when I became superintendent, we had a small but powerful group of teachers who had worked with the A+ Best Practices Center to really learn more about the integration of technology into the curriculum. They participated in all the professional development provided by the Microsoft Partners in Learning grant through ABPC. Those great teachers came to us and said this kind of teaching and learning needs to be happening in all our schools, throughout the county. And because of their leadership, and our work with them through the central office, we birthed what we call the 21st Century Learners Network, instigated by teachers like Jennifer Barnett, who led the Microsoft team at Fayetteville, went to Winterboro to help launch the PBL effort, and is back at Fayetteville this year to help there.
The 21st Century Learners Network has helped all of our educators understand the importance and the dynamics of making learning meaningful through authentic work, using all the technology we have available. And we have trained teachers every single year throughout the district as part of this network to infuse technology, to infuse project based learning, back in their classrooms. It’s all being led by teachers, and as we know, that’s the most powerful way to get other teachers on board — supporting teachers teaching teachers. We’ve now trained a group of teachers from every Talladega school in the PBL concept to go back and work with other teachers in their school to build capacity.
Each year we have a huge culminating activity, a showcase where all of our schools come together with students and teachers and they present work to each other and to visitors. This gives all of us the opportunity to learn what everyone has been doing during the course of the year. It’s one of the most meaningful events that I’ve ever been a part of.
This year we’re continuing to train additional groups across the district. One place where we felt like we need additional support is expanding the training experience for our principals, assistant principals, and teachers who are in instructional coaching roles in our schools. We want them to feel totally confident as they support all this change. So we’re doing that this year, too.
Norton: Rural communities are often traditional in their thinking. Have you encountered much resistance to the changes taking place in traditional teaching practices?
Lacey: One of the questions I’m most often asked is what have the parents had to say? “You’ve totally reconfigured the building and their students are learning in new and different ways.” And I’m able to be very positive in my response. The community is very trusting, and they immediately saw a change in their children and their interest level in school. So I guess you might say it sold itself with parents.
Having the students work in teams probably produced the most questions from home for the principal. Because teamwork requires a lot of careful planning and attention to participation. What happens when some team members aren’t pulling their load? Parents don’t like that. A student may come home and say “so-and-so is not doing their part of the work and I’m having to do all the work and we only made a B.” But we’ve worked through most of that now.
The change process at Winterboro has not only transformed the academics, it has really transformed every aspect of the school — the extracurricular activities, the athletics, the involvement of parents. It has really set that community on fire. Families are very proud of the work their children are doing — the children are so much more involved in school — and their little rural school is getting national attention for the work their students are accomplishing.
Norton: How has your partnership with the Alabama Best Practices Center figured into this work? You mentioned Talladega County’s involvement in the Microsoft Partners in Learning grant several years ago. What else?
Lacey: Last year we had an ongoing study of formative assessment with Cathy Gassenheimer and Julie Hannah. And of course we’re continuing our PD partnership with the Best Practices Center this year, with more on assessment and effective questioning, which Cathy and Jackie Walsh are leading.
The A+ Best Practices Center supports our work through high quality professional development. We’ve had a partnership with ABPC for a long time and it’s been even more intense in recent years. They are so good to not only support the work we do but help us to do it better. And I think one of the benefits they bring is the outside perspective — we’re building this plane as we fly it and we’re getting pretty good at it, but they’re always there to give us additional insight and bring other elements of best practice into our discussions.
Our work last year with formative assessment really aligned with the big picture of what we are trying to do with instruction: active engagement, project based learning, 21st century skills. ABPC is always on the cutting edge, so they’re able to truly help fill in the gaps when we need more professional resources in one area or another.
Norton: Is a PBL-based instructional approach more expensive that the traditional model?
Lacey: Absolutely not. You know, in my opinion, project based learning requires good planning skills and making sure that we invest our time in doing that planning well. It doesn’t cost anything, really. And any initial investment is more than compensated in higher levels of learning, more interest by students in their work, and the fact that their products are much more meaningful.
We do need more technology investment, because learning to learn — and to work — in a technology infused environment is essential for students today. We’ve got to have enough technology to really immerse our students in it. That’s just a must, and it can be frustrating in these difficult times.
But we’re moving forward — we’re building a strong base of what we call exceptional instruction through project based learning, assessment, Response to Intervention (RTI), 21st century skills. We’re building all of that because you’ve got to have it and you can’t wait for all the bells and whistles to put it in place. But having those technology bells and whistles would be really nice to energize everything even more.
If you missed Part 1 of our interview, you can read it here.
