CHARLESTON, W. Va.–The state department of education is taking a fresh look at middle school education.
The department has launched the development of the Middle School Empowerment Collaborative, a partnership between the Mountain State Education Cooperative, the Adventure Group, and the Southern Regional Education Board.
Deputy State School Superintendent Dr. Sara Lewis-Stankus said the program will take traditional classroom subjects and apply them to real situations in their community. She believes the students will not only be better learners, but they’ll be more engaged members of their communities.
“We’re talking about problems, not just simple problems of how to build a bench or something like that but our students are thinking about world problems and community problems and how to create solutions for those kinds of things,” Lewis-Stankus said during a media event in Morgantown Thursday.
Amy Stewart, a collaborative implementation coach, said adding the real-world aspect to education will give students more than a history of successfully taking tests and earning a high GPA. Stewart said classrooms will be intentionally transformed into a workplace-like environment, and students will be required to identify the problem and work within a group to solve it.
“Oftentimes that doesn’t mean a lot because we don’t know what those grades mean,” Stewart said. “We want to see kids graduating with a GPA, but also a portfolio of evidence of what they’ve done and that they have actually tracked their own growth and can speak to it.”
For now, the program will be tested at the Calhoun County Middle/High School and the Midland Trail Middle/High School in Fayette County. Stewart said her goal is to orderly expand this program as it is developed and perfected.
“I want to create something that anybody in the state can walk into and feel that school is different here,” Stewart said. “The kids want to be here, the teachers want to be here, and they all feel a sense of pride, not only in the school but in the place they live.”
The students at Midland Trail are currently analyzing tourism at the New River Gorge National Park and how it impacts their community. Midland Trail teacher Kennedy Moore said they’ll spend time at the park gathering information to better what role tourism plays in their community.
“We’re going to work more collaboratively within our subject areas and work on cross-curricular projects and tie those skills in at the same time,” Moore said.
Lewis-Stankus said as the program develops, so too will the type of problems or issues teachers and students decide to tackle. But, she said, the end result will be someone prepared to enter the workforce with soft skills, knowledge, and the ability to recognize and solve problems alone or in a group.
“Someone who will come to work, someone who knows how to work as a team member, which is one of the things these students are learning, and how to be critical thinkers,” Lewis-Stankus said. “All of those things are taught in the empowerment school.”