Louisville Middle School's 3-Week Field Trip
Gives New Meaning to "Hands-on Learning"
By Jim Adams
/c/ The Louisville (KY) Courier-Journal
After some rethinking of what ought to be going on in their classrooms,
a group of middle school teachers at the J. Graham Brown School in downtown
Louisville concluded that it ought to be: Nothing.
So, after shutting off the lights and locking their classroom doors, they
removed their students from the premises and delivered them instead to the
Louisville Science Center, 727 W. Main St.
Usually, when teacher remove students from a school building, it is expected
that they will bring them back to class within a reasonable time. The same
day, for example, is the way it's often done.
But in this case, the Brown School teachers took their students away and
did not return even one single child for a traditional class period for
three entire weeks -- during which time the students spent every school
day, 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., inside the Science Center, forming as a huge army
of volunteers, working in such roles as exhibit guides and demonstrators
of experiments. One group of 50 students in the fifth and sixth grades gathered
at the center in late March and early April, another group in late April
and early May.
Teacher Robin Lipsey calls the experience nothing less than "the most
exciting thing I've done in 20 years of teaching," and teacher Tony
Peake, speaking for the group, describes it as "the most dynamic experience
we have had in out teaching careers, in terms of effect on students."
Those raves weigh something, because between them, Peake and Lipsey have
almost five decades of teaching experience.
Why were they so please? The answer begins with the seed for this project,
which was sown unwittingly by Howard Gardner.
The world knows Gardner mainly as the Harvard professor, author, researcher
and apostate who popularized the heresy that intelligence is not a single
thing, and cannot be measured by a single test answered with pencil on paper.
For his work framing concepts of "multiple intelligences" and
identifying "seven levels of intelligence," he won a University
of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Education in 1990, and is generally recognized
as having re-focused much of modern thought about education.
"We believe that education should be firmly grounded in the institutions
and practices of society -- art and science museums, ateliers, scouting
and so on," Gardner wrote in one of his 11 books dealing with how people
learn. "Science, discovery and children's museums offer a rich and
powerful opportunity for children to draw upon the different forms of knowledge
that are generally left unintegrated, treated in isolation from each other,
or perhaps ignored in school . . . .
"Schools have become increasingly anachronistic," Gardner continued,
"while museums have retained the potential to engage students, to teach
them, to stimulate their understanding and, most important, to help them
assume responsibility for their own future learning."
After listening to Gardner at length during a seminar in California last
year, Peake returned eager to apply his concepts in some concrete way. Through
conversations with others at the Brown School, and with $11,000 available
from a large grant to local middle schools from the Edna McConnell Clark
Foundation of New York City, a plan emerged: Brown could pilot the concept
of an extended stay at the center during which students would be thoroughly
immersed in the subject matter of the center and in real-world experiences
of many sorts.
And so the pilot flew. What impressed the adults who watched so much was,
first, the high level of responsibility the students assumed and, second,
the solid understanding of subject matter they developed.
That was necessary because the students, as exhibit guides, for example,
were required to stand on their feet and discuss what they had learned with
anyone who arrived--other students, adults, people of all ages and interests.
For example, Kara Nett, a 12-year-old sixth grader, selected an experiment
-- creating a substance out of corn starch and water that felt solid yet
flowed like liquid -- and demonstrated it in the center's Discovery Depot.
Likewise, her partner Sam Gaines, with a glass, a tissue and an aquarium
full of water, chose to demonstrate how water pressure works upon a pocket
of air trapped under water.
In the center's Egyptian exhibit whcih includes a mummy, Rachle Dragoo,
after independently reading about Egyptian gods and culture, was the tiny
voice who said to all visitors: "Hi, welcome to the mummy's tomb. I'm
going to take you through. My name is Rachel." In classmate Terrance
Taylor, who has read about dinosaurs as long as he can remember, the center
briefly acquired an expert lecturer.
In what they wrote about their experience -- in journals, daily work units
and letters -- it is evident the students in general rose to the expectations
placed upon them. "One thing you should make sure the kids know,"
Same wrote in a letter to Peake, "is that they are doing something
no other school in Kentucky is doing andmake sure they treat the museum
with respect, the employees with respect, and most of all the visitors.
They should have fun but should also work . . . hard."
It's the rare museum where the staff wears braces and funky fingernail polish.
But by all accounts, the experiment worked. #
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