Education Week - March 5, 2014 - Leaders to Learn From - S27

STEM LEARNING
B.J. Worthington
DIRECTOR OF SCHOOLS
Clarksville-Montgomery County Schools, Tennessee
BY LIANA HEITIN
L
ast summer, about 100 public school
teachers of all grade levels were scat-
tered throughout the city of Clarksville,
Tenn.-at the fire department, the mayor's
office, an architecture firm, a metalprocessing
plant-shadowing business
and government employees for a week
at a time. The teachers spent their days
learning practical, real-world skills, like
how to fortify a cement structure or detect
moisture in a high-vaulted ceiling, and
brainstorming ways to incorporate what
they were learning into their next year's
science, technology, engineering, and
mathematics lessons.
The externship program is the brainchild
of B.J. Worthington, a 28-year veteran in
the 31,000-student Clarksville-Montgomery
County school system. Two years ago,
by a unanimous school board vote and what
some have described as popular demand
from the community, Mr. Worthington, 53,
became the director of schools (the district's
title for superintendent) for the district, located
about 50 miles northwest of Nashville.
A former high school science teacher and
principal, Mr. Worthington bolstered the district's
STEM focus, spurred by a federal Race
to the Top grant that he had helped win,
and piloted the externship program with
a small cohort of high school teachers that
same summer.
Since he took over the district, it has re-
ceived an additional $10 million in competitive
grants from groups including the U.S.
Department of Defense Education Activity,
which oversees the education of the children
of members of the military. (About a quarter
of the district's students have parents working
at Fort Campbell, across the border in
Kentucky.)
Jon Clark, a local architect, hosted sev-
eral rounds of externs last summer. "We
take them out to construction sites, show
them how things are being put together,
talk about what we do as architects," he said.
"There were a lot of those moments where
we're there sitting around the conference
room, and you'd see the lightbulb go [on] and
[a teacher] would say, 'Wow, I'm going to talk
to my class about that.' "
Periodically, Mr. Clark said, Mr. Worthington
would appear on site to visit with both
the teachers and their new mentors. "He's
a very hands-on superintendent of schools.
He shows up, he's interested, he's game on,
he's wanting to further his own education."
The externships are part of a larger
math-science-integration initiative that
began four years ago, when the district
won $5 million in Race to the Top money
for STEM innovation. Mr. Worthington, the
chief academic officer at the time, led that
initiative and devised a plan that, as he explains
it, "would sustain us after the Race
to the Top money was gone." The district piloted
combination science and math classes
at some grade levels, with an emphasis on
project-based learning, or learning "challenges,"
in which students learn the science
and math standards by identifying
and resolving real-world problems that
require the use of those skills. For instance,
elementary students might have to build a
flotation device to get a gingerbread man
across water safely, or middle school students
must find a way to remix concrete to
make a weak beam stronger.
Now, the majority of teachers integrate
their math and science lessons using such
challenges, said Dale Rudolph, the district's
STEM coordinator.
Solving Real Problems
For example, last summer, Donna Cooper,
a 5th grade teacher at Sango Elementary
School, externed with a project manager
for the city of Clarksville. Since then, she's
had her students work on finding creative
ways to address bank erosion at a local
marina-which she learned about through
her job shadowing-using "the concepts of
gravity, friction, mass, and potential and
kinetic energy," she wrote in an email.
Lori Smith, the vice president of the
Clarksville-Mongomery PTO and the mother
of a 2nd and a 4th grader, said she's "a huge
fan" of the integration initiative.
"What I see in the kids is it changes the
way they think," she added. For example,
she said, about a year ago, her son asked her
what causes earthquakes. "I told him that
the plates shift, and it causes the ground to
move. And he said, 'Well, Mom, I don't understand
that because the Earth is always
moving because it's spinning and moving
around the sun. So how is it that that
movement is different than the plates in the
Earth?' " she recalled. "He was 7."
According to Becky Jackman,the president
of the Clarksville-Montgomery County
Education Association, "Everybody knows
STEM is [Mr. Worthington's] passion." In devising
the subject-integration initiative, she
said, he and other district leaders "looked at
several other models, but they didn't just do
anybody else's model, they tried to do what
was best for our students and teachers."
With the Race to the Top grant, the district
also began a high school STEM Academy-a
school-within-a-school that has one teacher
in each core subject and an engineer on staff.
Students in the district who demonstrate
aptitude in math and science can apply to
attend the prestigious program.
The teachers there frame lessons around
an essential question or theme. One year,
students studied how food goes from "conception
to consumption." They dissected a
cow uterus, discussed cloning and artificial
insemination, and read Temple Grandin's
work on designs for handling livestock.
According to the district's accountability
and assessment supervisor, Kimi Sucharski,
Mr. Worthington's efforts have led to
"greater than expected academic growth"
in math and science for the district. From
2011-12 to 2012-13, the percentage of 8th
grade students achieving grade-level mastery
in science moved from 68 percent to
75 percent, and in math, it moved from 42
percent to 52 percent. Value-added scores,
which measure growth in student achievement
over the previous year, showed better
than anticipated gains for grades 3 through
8 in both subjects.
To meet another one of Mr. Worthington's
goals, of "100 percent graduation," the district
has held symbolic graduation ceremonies,
had students sign pledge cards, and
worked to engage parents and business
leaders to make a diploma a priority for
students. The graduation rate climbed for
several years before 2011-12 and has hovered
around 95 percent on Mr. Worthington's
watch. Ms. Smith said the schools' chief is
still looking to improve it.
The 100 percent graduation initiative has
received some pushback for being lofty, according
to Elise Shelton, a district spokeswoman.
However, she noted that it was a
goal created "in conjunction with business
leaders in the community. We all kept saying,
'If it is not all, then who do we exclude?'"
One thing stakeholders in the district
seem to agree on is that Mr. Worthington
has bridged the gap with the community in
ways that are overall mutually beneficial.
For instance, a requirement of teacher externs
"is that they establish a relationship
with the business and maintain it throughout
the year," said Ms. Rudolph, the STEM
coordinator. The business and community
leaders "come into our schools and actually
help our students with these science and
math problems."
As Ms. Rudolph sees it, that's a win-win.
The business leaders bring real-world expertise
to classrooms, she said, "and we're
building those 21st-century skills our business
community has told us they want in
our graduates."n
LEADERS TO LEARN FROM > leaders.edweek.org
EDUCATION WEEK * March 5, 2014
| S27
Josh Anderson for Education Week
http://leaders.edweek.org
Education Week - March 5, 2014 - Leaders to Learn From

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Education Week - March 5, 2014 - Leaders to Learn From
