In Rowan County, there are some fresh voices making their mark on the rich tradition of storytelling in Appalachia. Fourth grade students at McBrayer Elementary are sharing what it is like to be a kid in Eastern Kentucky today through their Adventures of Fourth Grade podcast, available on Spotify. The students take turns writing, producing and presenting the monthly podcast, with a little help from the districts’ digital learning coach. Through the process, the students are learning research skills, collaboration, media literacy, technology and storytelling—all while sending a finished project out into the world.
Project-based learning, which teaches real-world skills by doing, is being integrated into more and more Kentucky schools alongside traditional classroom instruction. This approach is part of a larger effort to make students’ experiences in school more relevant to the life and work skills they will need upon graduation.
In response to an ever-changing workforce landscape, Kentucky schools and districts have been drafting a new “portrait of a learner” to concentrate on durable skills that will be useful no matter what field a student chooses to pursue. As a result, skills like problem solving, communication, adaptability, citizenship, and more are becoming part of the goal of academic achievement.
This work accelerated when Rowan County was chosen to be part of the third cohort of the Local Laboratories of Learning (L3s), a key part of United We Learn, the Kentucky Department of Education’s new vision for the future of public education in the commonwealth.
L3s include a large and diverse group of parents, teachers, school leaders and community members from across the state. In spring 2021, they conducted interviews about what kind of education system Kentuckians want to see.
“We are in the stages of really looking at our profile of the learner and determining those skills and dispositions, in addition to that knowledge that students are gaining with standards, but really looking at those skills and dispositions that our community values and to build that profile of a learner,” said Rowan County Assistant Superintendent Brandy Carver. “We had started doing the work, but L3 led us to a place where we could really say, okay, this is what we really think are important skills for students to have. What are your thoughts? What is your input? Last year, our culminating event at the end of the year was looking at community saying, ‘okay, this is what we think, but what do you guys think?’ And can we mesh those two and put them together? We've come out with what I think is a really strong profile.”
Carver said that the updated focus points educators toward stronger connections with employers and the community while boosting student engagement. She said that the district is committed to producing graduates better prepared for the world beyond high school.
Project-based learning has also provided an opportunity for community members to become more engaged in the schools by providing projects, guidance and feedback.
“I think another benefit of having community involvement is that the community is becoming aware of the deeper learning kinds of experiences that we are working on to give our students,” said Edna Schack, community co-lead of the Rowan County Schools L3 Coalition. “It's not the school that I went to, and it's not the school that my kids went to 15, 20 years ago. It's important that the community see that students are learning, not just from paper and pencil, not just at the computer screen, but they're learning from their experiences and some of those experiences are happening in the community.”
Schack has acted as a community liaison for the Rowan County schools, reaching out to her contacts in the community to help them fulfill requests from the schools.
This has led to relationships that have benefited both the business community and the schools, like the partnership with the local water treatment plant. Employees at the plant assisted 8th grade classes with a water treatment science experiment and hosted them for a tour of the plant. It gave the employees a chance to show students what their job entails and spark an interest in the field, planting the seeds for the future workforce.
“They treated them like kings and queens,” said Carver. “They're like, ‘nobody wants to go to the water treatment plant to do anything!’ They were just so excited to even be able to talk to our kids about the jobs that they're doing.”
