Ethan Demme

Thoughts and Policy for Building a Better Pennsylvania

Lancaster County Conservancy

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Founded in 1969, the Lancaster County Conservancy is devoted to saving and stewarding the ecosystems and landscapes upon which we depend for food, clean water and air, economic and public health, and the restoration of soul and spirit. The Conservancy has four main programs:

Land Protection Program: Focuses on our county’s natural resources “gems’ such as forest communities or streams and wetlands with the goal of protecting our most vital natural resources.

The Conservancy has protected over 5,474 acres of natural lands in Lancaster (York and Chester) County with 38 preserves that are open to the general public 365 days per year.

Stewardship Program: Manages Conservancy properties so that healthy habitats exist for people and wildlife.  Activities include: development of management plans, employed stewardship crews, trash clean-up and invasive plant control.

Education Program: Engages local school districts, students and adults in outdoor classrooms and the utilization of Conservancy properties.

Urban Greening Program: LIVE Green strives to build strong and healthy communities through environmental projects.  LIVE Green focuses a  majority of its efforts in the City of Lancaster through its Urban Watershed Initiative.

On the website, Lancaster Conservancy lists these ideas for family activities for exploring nature:

  • Look for insects, leaves, clouds, stars
  • Read a favorite nature story
  • Listen to night-time sounds outside
  • Watch a bird fly high in the sky
  • Touch a wiggly worm
  • Observe leaves falling in the fall
  • Use your nose to smell an interesting flower

Click here to see a map and listing of the Conservancy’s preserves sorted by school district. For more information about the educational opportunities the Conservancy offers (including field trips), click here.

STEM Teacher Training – Wilson Institute

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I recently had the privilege of meeting Dr. Arthur Levine, the sixth president of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, at the 2015 PA Business Conference. Dr. Levine shared with me about his work at the Foundation which aims to increase the number of quality STEM teachers by working at the state and local level.

The Wilson Foundation was founded in 1945 as a response to “a shortage of college faculty at the conclusion of World War II by offering talented students the opportunity to attend doctoral programs and begin college teaching careers.” The Teaching Fellowship began in 2007 in the state of Indian and has expanded to Michigan, Ohio, New Jersey, and most recently Georgia. This fellowship has a two-fold goal: 1): increase the quantity of math and science teachers particularly in urban and rural settings and 2): to improve the quality of university-based teacher education.

I appreciate the excellent structure Fellowship program. Fellows are given money towards university tuition (masters degree) and in exchange make a commitment to teaching for at least three years in high-need areas within the state where they studied. The program matches these teachers with participating local schools and gives them intense mentoring from a mentor from the school in which they are teaching and a mentor from the university where they completed their master’s degree.

This program is remarkably effective. For example, in Indiana, the Foundation is producing 80 Fellows annually which is an increase of certified teachers by more than 30%. In addition, because the program develops strong ties with individual universities and schools at a local level, the program creates a sustainable impact on teacher education and teaching in each state.

A comprehensive assessment of the program also speaks to the success of the program. The assessment found that after the required three years, “Fellows have an 81%  retention rate in high-need schools. They are 1.9 times more likely to remain teachers than their peers. Achievement among their students is three to four months ahead of peers.”

Dr. Levine is leading a fantastic program and the model that Woodrow is based on is one worth studying and emulating. Change at the local and state level is not only more efficient, but it is also more cost-effective. The teaching fellowship, by its very design, is built for long-lasting effect.

To read more about the Wilson Foundation, visit their website. To learn more about the teaching fellowship specifically, click here.

Independent Learning Plans

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Alaska’s Chugach School District (CSD) is the first district to transform itself full into a competency-based school. In a blog series on CSD, Bob Crumley, CSD’s current superintendent, described their transformation, “We began to talk with community members about what they wanted for their children and their schools. We realized that first and foremost we needed to center schools around our students. We needed to be more comprehensive as we structured schools that would prepare them for life beyond graduation.”

To that end, CSD set out to develop a mission statement that could guide them in implementing this new model of learning. Here’s what they came up with:

“The Chugach School District is committed to developing and supporting a partnership with students, parents, community and business which equally shares the responsibility of empowering students to meet the needs of the ever changing world in which they live. Students shall possess the academic and personal characteristics necessary to reach their full potential. Students will contribute to their community in a manner that displays respect for human dignity and validates the history and culture of all ethnic groups.”

This competency-based model is made up of four interconnected parts:

  • Student empowerment: “Students need to be able to seek out things they are personally interested in, create a plan, and find the resources. We are always looking for ways to students to learn beyond the classroom.”
  • Assessment systems: “CSD uses a common scoring (grading) system with Emerging, Developing, Proficient, and Advanced. Reaching 80 percent on an assessment indicates proficiency and 90 percent is advanced.” – “Before a student moves onto to the next level there is a cumulative assessment based on up to three assessments. The first, described as the analytical assessment, is the student’s reflection on his or her learning. Second, there is a skill assessment that focuses on the specific content. The third, a performance assessment, is often co-designed with students. In this assessment, they show evidence of their ability to apply their skill.
  • Domains of learning (content areas): “ten content domains of standards: mathematics, technology, social sciences, reading, writing, culture & communication (student will understand and appreciate the unique aspects of their own culture, as well as Alaska Native or world cultures), personal/social/service (the values and skills necessary to reach one’s full potential and foster the development of those around them), career development, PE/health (healthy interpersonal strategies that apply in both rural and urban environments), and science.”
  • Preparing for life: “We have to be a slingshot. There is a momentum that builds to propel students forward beyond their graduating high school. They need to have a wide array of opportunities. I don’t know if we have to help them find their specific direction, as it is going to change a lot in their late teens and early twenties. It’s a rarity for teens to know exactly what they want to do and successfully pursue it. We need to help them have the capacity to take advantage of changing interests.”

For an in-depth analysis of CSD’s model, below is the blog post series that I pulled the above quotes from. It’s worth reading the whole series, but particularly the first two posts.

Post 1 – Driven by Student Empowerment: Chugach School District
Post 2 – Chugach School District’s Performance-Based Infrastructure
Post 3 – Chugach Teachers Talk about Teaching
Post 4 – Ownership, Not Buy-In: An Interview with Bob Crumley
Post 5 – Performance-Based Education in a One-Room School House
Post 6 – Teaching through the Culture: Native Education in a Performance-Based System
Post 7 – Performance-Based Home Schooling

To read about other schools that are implementing Independent Learning Plans, click here to read an article from Getting Smart.com. You can read more about the story behind CSD by reading the book Delivering On The Promise.

The movement towards competency based instruction is starting to pick up steam and I am looking forward to seeing the results.

Math Students: Sense Makers Not Mistake Makers

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lImage by wecometolearn CC BY 2.0

For many, if not all, students, achieving mastery in mathematics involves intense struggle. Often, that struggle is seen as a negative thing, by teachers and students alike, and becomes the source of frustration. But what if we were to shift our perspective on students as “mistake-makers” to “sense makers”? What if we celebrated the process, trials and errors and all, as much as the ability to solve a problem and get a right answer?

This perspective, students as sense-makers, is championed by math teacher David Wees. In an article in MindShift, Wee is quoted:

“I want to know the ways that they [the students] are thinking rather than the ways they are making mistakes . . . My interpretation that they’re making a mistake is a judgment and usually ends my thinking about what they are doing.”

This way of thinking is also celebrated by mathematician Paul Lockhart who writes:

Mathematics is the art of explanation. If you deny students the opportunity to engage in this activity— to pose their own problems, make their own conjectures and discoveries, to be wrong, to be creatively frustrated, to have an inspiration, and to cobble together their own explanations and proofs— you deny them mathematics itself.

Wees says that “Kids ask questions: 1) to find out if they did the problem right; 2) because the teacher is standing near them and they can, and; 3) occasionally they ask “I wonder what if” questions, which show they are thinking about the math.” In order to help his students develop their mathematical thinking abilities “Wees took to not answering the first two kinds of questions and encouraging the third. He found himself often asking the same question, whether a student had gotten the problem right or wrong. He’d ask them to explain their answer or how they could check to see if they were right or wrong.”

To explore more about this philosophy of mathematics, check out my series on parental engagement in math. And to read about how we can turn everyone into a math person, click here.

Let’s Turn Every Child Into A “Math Person”

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Are you a “math person”? Most likely, the way in which you answer this question determines how well you understand mathematical concepts, and just as important, how much you appreciate/enjoy mathematics. But what if that is the wrong question?

What if we are all math people, at least until we’re convinced that we’re not?

A writer for an article on Quartz explains that the research just does not support the notion that we are genetically predisposed to either understand mathematics or not. Instead, he proposes the “love it and learn it” hypothesis, which is more supported by the research and which has three elements:

  • For anyone, the more time spent thinking about and working on math, the higher the level of mathematical skill achieved.
  • Those who love math spend more time thinking about and working on math.
  • There is a genetic component to how much someone loves math.

So what are the implications if this hypothesis is true? The article goes on:

If the “love it and learn it” hypothesis is true, it gives a simple recommendation for someone who wants to get better at math: spend more time thinking about and working on math. Best of all: spend time doing math in the kinds of ways people who love math spend time doing math.

if a kid has a bad experience trying to learn math in school, or is bored with some bits of math, the answer isn’t to say “Well maybe you just aren’t a math person.” Instead, it is to find some other way to help that kid with math and to find other bits of math that would be exciting for their particular kid to help build her or his interest and confidence.

Why do so many people get convinced that they are just “not a math person”? If someone has an awful math teacher as a student, it’s common for the student to associate his/her frustrations with math, rather than the teacher. Another big problem is that classroom instruction is not set up to be student-paced. The article quotes blogger Cathy O’Neil who writes:

There’s always someone faster than you. And it feels bad, especially when you feel slow, and especially when that person cares about being fast, because all of a sudden, in your confusion about all sort of things, speed seems important. But it’s not a race. Mathematics is patient and doesn’t mind.

Being good at math is really about how much you want to spend your time doing math. And I guess it’s true that if you’re slower you have to want to spend more time doing math, but if you love doing math then that’s totally fine.

Click here to read the rest of the article. It’s fairly lengthy but well worth reading.

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