If you’re one who ascribes any significance to acronyms in education, you might be tempted to say that four Delaware school districts are on the BRINC of linking to the future.
BRINC is the acronym for the four districts — Brandywine, Indian River, New Castle County Vocational Technical and Colonial — that have collaborated to secure a $600,000 innovation grant from the state Department of Education for a project called “Linking to the Future.” This groundbreaking project aims to transform how high school teachers teach and how their students learn.
The grant is the largest of 14 totaling nearly $1.5 million awarded statewide in August for innovative improvement programs. Of these grants, it is the only one that involves collaboration among districts.
The alliance among the districts opens up the possibility for something never before tried in Delaware: students at Concord High School in northern Brandywine Hundred (or any other high school in the districts) sharing a teacher on a daily basis with students at Indian River High School, 105 miles to the south in Dagsboro. To achieve this feat, “Linking to the Future” will rely heavily on the effective use of new technology.
Brandywine School District educators talk about the BRINC project
Brandywine School District educators talk about the BRINC project.
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While the grant includes funding for a project manager, the fact that the position isn’t expected to be filled until sometime in October hasn’t stopped the districts from getting started.
At each of the 10 participating high schools, four teachers, primarily in math and language arts, are working among themselves to learn new technology and develop new techniques and, as the year progresses, they will be sharing their ideas with their colleagues and with teachers at the other schools.
With each teacher typically seeing 100 to 150 students a day, the innovative programming will reach an estimated 5,400 students this year, says Lori Duerr, Colonial’s manager of school improvement. That’s more than 43 percent of the 12,265 students enrolled at the 10 high schools.
“We’re playing off each other quite well,” says Kimberly Flanagan, an English teacher at Brandywine High School. Rather than stand in front of her class or behind a projector, Flanagan moves about her room, iPad in hand, wirelessly displaying her lesson plans, students’ worksheets and relevant web pages onto the 60-inch television monitor mounted high in one corner of the classroom.
“It’s an ongoing process,” Flanagan says. “Our entire staff has iPads and Apple TVs in their rooms and in their hands. We’re running little workshops, cyber cafes if you will. To come up to speed on the technology, teachers are willing to come in and spend their own time learning how it works"
In his Advanced Placement biology class, teacher David Eroh has developed an innovative unit on seed germination. Working in groups of three or four, one student sorts a handful of birdseed into separate piles by seed type while others use their iPads to find web pages with photos to identify each type of seed and listings of their germination periods. Using a stylus instead of chalk or pencil, Eroh prints notes onto his iPad for his students to view on the TV monitor.
“We’re only two weeks into the year. I’m still trying to figure how to make it work best,” he says.
The methods Eroh is using demonstrate two significant changes in teaching style.
“We’re getting away from the ‘stand and deliver’ approach,” with the teacher at the head of the class and students seated “as the receiver of all things,” says Lincoln Hohler, Brandywine’s assistant superintendent.
And, by putting equipment like iPads in students’ hands in the classroom, “we’re helping students get ready for jobs and careers that might not have been invented yet,” says Judson Wagner, the district’s administrator in charge of instructional technology.
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The “Linking to the Future” project originated as a collaboration among the four districts last year as they sought a share of funds available through the state’s Race to the Top grant from the U.S. Department of Education, said Sandra Smith, director of assessment and accountability at Indian River. They didn’t win that grant, but thought they had developed too much momentum to let the idea drop. When the state decided to award the innovation grants this summer, the districts had their application ready to go.
To adults who have been away from school for a few years, Smith might seem to be speaking in a different tongue. “It’s a little hard to describe because every classroom will be different, based on the skills of the teacher and the students themselves,” she says. “We’re looking at blended learning, flipped classrooms, online learning, all sorts of different avenues for our students.”
Blended learning, as seen in Eroh’s classroom, involves groups of students working together while performing different tasks with the teacher focusing less on lecturing and more on guiding and monitoring.
“Flipped classrooms” refers to assignments once given as homework being completed in the classroom while students pick up the material formerly delivered in classroom lectures on their computers at home, either in a format recorded by the teacher or as a link to relevant websites.
One benefit to the flipped classroom approach, Smith explains, is that if a student is struggling with a math problem or a grammar exercise in the classroom, the mistake can be corrected at once; at home, the student might make the same error repeatedly and then receive a poor grade on the assignment.
Using technology enables teachers to give students more support as they navigate complex projects like English term papers, Duerr says. “It used to be you would turn it in at the end of the course and get a grade,” she says. “Working online and interactively, the teacher can watch as the paper is being developed throughout the semester, giving the student ongoing feedback throughout the process.”
The educators aren’t sure how the ultimate innovation in this linkage — the interdistrict classes — will fall into place. A real-time connection between a teacher in one school and students in another (a system already in use on a limited basis in the Red Clay Consolidated School District) is one possibility. Or, a class could be recorded at one school to be played later at another. A third option is the purchase of packaged online classes that could be used in several districts, with teachers in different classes supplementing the online lessons.
Although the Department of Education grant covers just this year, completing the transformation to a more student-centered approach to learning in high schools will take much longer, perhaps seven to 10 years, Hohler says.
“We hope this becomes a model for other districts,” Wagner says.
“We don’t want this to be one of those initiatives that comes in and makes a little dent. We know what needs to happen,” Hohler says. “This is a major undertaking, not just a mindset shift, but building a whole new curriculum.”