Bright Spots

    I fully believe that there are so many bright spots within our schools that often get dimmed by the bigger “problems”. I have watched administrations continuously focus on how to uproot an entire system to “fix” the problems instead of evaluating what was previously working and try to build off of that. Then, when they have the miracle fix, everyone in the system gets uprooted and turned on their head while trying to adapt. Once we finally get in the swing of the new procedures, there seems to be yet another wave of change and turn over, instead of focusing on our many bright spots in each scenario. 

    One technology bright spot that is coming to mind is the work my coworker and I are currently test running in our school. Our school has problem with over crowded study halls with minimal staff coverage. On top of that, some students having more than one study hall with minimal homework or lack of motivation to get their assigned work done. Our administrations solution to fix this was to uproot every teacher and students schedule to create more manageable study halls. This was causing issues with special education support and overall scheduling conflicts for many teachers. Due to this, many teachers just sat around and complained instead of trying to find solutions. All this does causes a divide between the staff and administration. 

    This is when the science teacher on my team and I put our heads together to say, “How can we help without uprooting the whole schedule? What did we do in the past that motivated students and try to recreate it with our new administration?” This led us to think back on the different times we were able to co teach together and got kids moving and doing experiments. We then remembered that one of our principals had a grant accepted to get a bunch of STEM equipment, from 3D printers to laser cutters and circuit boards. We then took this in our own hands and proposed to our administration to hold a course during one of the heavier study hall periods throughout the day to take some students to help us create our STEM lab. We put together a list of 10 students from 8th grade to Juniors in high school to join us on piloting a STEM class. Our only requests was that the class was at least 50% female, a no tolerance policy for behaviors due to the expensive equipment, students would either get a half credit in math or science, and that we got to pick the students involved in order to give accurate data based on our school demographic. When we presented this idea to our principal, he was all in and got it all squared away with our guidance department and central office. Then we were off and running. 

    We went around and pitched the ideas to different types of students that we hand picked from the study hall rosters. We have some students who go above and beyond in everything they do, the students who get stuck in the middle of the road and often get overlooked, and a few of what we like to call the “jack wagons”, who often find every excuse to not be in class and are students that we fear will drop out of school. Once we had the student buy in, we pulled them from their study halls, which helped relieve the class sizes for the study hall monitors. Currently, I have been working with a small group on how to use a Circut machine and its soft ware because it uses many of the same mechanics and programming as a laser cutter. At the end of our first and second days, I had two students, that I earlier classified being in the fear of dropping out category, come up and tell me that they did not want to have any snow days or miss class because they felt that this course offering gave them aa purpose to go to school. I had other students who would run into school the next day to show me where they put their new stickers at home, because they were proud of their work. 

    This was a SIMPLE change. My coworker and I willingly gave up one of our preps to test pilot a program in order to better our students learning enviroment that was backed on previous data of projects we have done. We did not uproot the whole system by doing this and have it affect everyone in the building. What this did was help fix the initial problem of overcrowded study halls by integrating new technology in our schools for students to learn how to set up and use. This was just one of the small bright spots within our school, and I know there are many more that we could help unleash if we just give it the time and resources needed instead of jumping the gun and turning over a whole system.