Stronger Together by Erin Watts

At Linn-Mar teachers are required to visit a Model Teacher each school year.  The district employs 35 Model Teachers in the Teacher Leadership Program across all grade levels, Pre-K through 12 and all content areas.  Teachers are encouraged to visit classrooms outside of their department and/or grade level and are free to visit as many Model Teachers as they would like.  In case you have been on the fence as to the impact of a model teacher visit, I challenge you to read the rest of this post.  You may be surprised how a visit out of your content, your grade level, or your building might impact your thinking and your teaching.

In February, High School Project Lead the Way (PLTW) teacher Corey Spurling, scheduled a visit to Jade Calcara’s kindergarten classroom who is a Model Teacher in Linn-Mar’s Teacher Leadership Program.  Corey and Jade are acquainted outside of school and had talked about getting their students together at some point but as of yet hadn’t made it happen.  After Corey observed Jade’s STEM lesson with her kindergarteners about balance using scales and candy hearts, the two saw connections in their curriculum and surmised that getting their students together for a joint lesson would prove powerful learning for all.

On March 7, twelve of Corey’s Introduction to Engineering students boarded a bus for Linn Grove elementary.  As 19 excited kindergarteners awaited their arrival, Mrs. Calcara prepped her class letting them know they would have a high school buddy and would be working on building something together.  “I’ve never done this before,” she told her students, “I’m going to be learning just like you are learning.”

The high school students were given the details of the intended project only minutes before they arrived at the elementary school.  With their kindergarten buddies, their task was to design the tallest structure possible to support a marshmallow using a yard each of string, tape and 20 pieces of spaghetti.

In an efficient manner, the older students filed into the room, introduced themselves and called out which kindergarten student(s) they were assigned to work with.  The groups found space in the classroom to work; they had 8 minutes to brainstorm ideas for their structure, making notes and drawings in the older students’ engineering notebooks.

The engineering students could be heard asking the kindergarteners mediative questions such as:

“What do you think?” 

“What are some of your ideas?” 

“What’s another way we could try that?” 

“What shapes should we use to make it strong?”

At the end of the allotted 8 minutes, the building materials were handed out.  The groups would now have 30 minutes to build their structures, with a goal of making them as tall as possible in the given time frame.

Corey has 24 students in this particular section of Introduction to Engineering.  The 12 students who remained at the High School being supervised by Instructional Coach Sheri Crandall, were engaged in this same task of attempting to build the tallest structure possible.  This project has been done many times over in the PLTW world arena with very young children up through professional adult engineers.  According to Corey, nearly always the youngest thinkers are the groups that build the tallest structures.  It was a contest today to see if the findings would be the same at Linn-Mar.

The kindergarteners jumped right to work once the materials were distributed.  Excited exclamations could be heard all over the room:

“I’ve got a good idea!”

“Wait, let’s try this!”

“Maybe we should add….. “

“We need more weight on this side.” 

“It’s OK, let’s fix it.”

“I don’t know, let’s try it out.”

Although there are times when some students in Jade’s class find it difficult to focus their attention on the lesson at hand, today, all students were highly engaged in their thinking and learning.

As the 30 minutes came to a close, Corey moved to each group, measured their structures and recorded the final height in the engineering students’ notebooks.  The High School students signed their notes certifying that the work was the intellectual property of their group and the kindergarteners added their signatures as witnesses.

When asked how it went with her group, one kindergartener responded, “We used all our ideas together to make it stronger.”

45 minutes had passed and it was time for the engineering students to return to the High School.  After their departure, Jade led her class in a reflection of the project.  They proclaimed that it was, “Awesome!  Fun!  Cool!”  Her also students told how it was frustrating when their structure would break but that they kept trying until it stood tall.  Jade paraphrased her class saying this was an example of flexible thinking and that had they been rigid in their thinking they may have given up and not been as successful. Growth Mindset was evident based on the kindergartners vocabulary and discussion.

Upon returning to their classroom, the engineering students learned that the kindergarten class did indeed build the taller structure with a height of 33 inches compared to 25 inches from the group that remained at the High School!  Plans are in the works for the other half of Corey’s class to visit Linn Grove with a different project in the coming month. 

The impact of this lesson was increased by the collaboration of the teachers and the students.  Imagine what your students could accomplish with another Linn-Mar classroom.