Prescott eNews

The sound of silence. Not what you expect when you walk into a middle school auditorium with approximately 175 students…. all of them sitting quietly and paying close attention to what was going on in front of them. But you could have heard the proverbial “pin drop” at an assembly at Prescott Mile High Middle School (PMHMS) last week.

The reason for the silence was the topic of the assembly. Several classes are studying World War II and the presentation was called “About Death and Dying: Physical Representations of WWII Causality Statistics.” There were a lot of causalities in WWII, and teachers at Mile High wanted those numbers to literally come alive to the students. The strictly enforced silence was out of respect and also seemed to serve as tool to give students a finer focus on the event.

Mile High teacher Stephanie Grotbeck’s class represented the number of civilians who died. She divided her students up, and then divided the number of civilians lost. Each student then represented a country and the number of people from there that died during the war. The students then made a poster with their country’s name on it and the number of people who died. The students lined up on stage and as their country was read off, they stepped out of the light and into the darker area of the stage further back. This hands-on approach to learning is part of the new system called Expeditionary Learning.

Last year Mile High started to implement Expeditionary Learning into a section of their classes and some of the results were demonstrated with this presentation. Expeditionary Learning is an educational system designed to combine what their website explains as a combination of “rigorous academic content and real world projects -- learning expeditions -- with active teaching and community service. The ELS design focuses on teaching in an engaging way. Faculty members receive intensive professional development in curriculum, teaching practices, and building a strong school culture. Expeditionary Learning is now being implemented in over 140 urban, rural, and suburban schools.” Northpoint Expeditionary Learning Academy in Prescott uses the E.L. system in the entire school. In fact it’s completely different learning style is what sets it apart from Prescott High School. Both high schools are a part of Prescott Unified School District (PUSD) and are free. Currently only twelve communities in the United States have received grants from Expeditionary Learning Schools Outward Bound (witch is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) to create new schools and Northpoint is one of the twelve.

Beth Sharp, one of the teachers on the team at Mile High says that this is the groups first year together and their first year working within the EL principles. She says, “The presentation today was the kick off event to our unit: "Newton Rules: applying Newton's laws to the contributing factors of WWII." We were looking for a kick off that would give the kids the big picture of this very important period in history.” The team met over Christmas break to brainstorm ideas that would help the students see this as a focused unit that would communicate the magnitude of what happened during WWII. She also stated that they “learned a thing or two ourselves!”

This assembly was the kick off for the unit and their goal was go give the students background information and stimulate their interest in the subject. Sharp said, “In talking with my class afterward the majority felt that they had learned something and that what they had seen raised questions in their minds. In this way the presentations act as scaffolding for studies they will be doing over the next few weeks.

Principal Joe Howard attended the assembly and was pleased with the results. He feels the students really got a lot out of the program and said, “It helps them to really see what was happening in World War II. But what’s different about this group of teachers is that they integrated math and ratios into that so they could work with the numbers. They integrated the speaking, listening and language arts, so they were learning a variety of objectives here. That’s what’s above and beyond about this whole thing. Also the whole piece of the kids having an audience and a real purpose to present to; it puts a real positive pressure on learning and presenting.”