Enabling Change

Bravely Taking Steps to Improve the Student Experience in Hinsdale Middle School

That’s what a small team from Hinsdale School District wondered back in September when they launched into a day-long community listening session. It was one of the very first activities this team did as part of their participation in NGLC’s Bravely.

It is a brave thing to do. To listen so deeply. To hold the weight of responsibility of all that feedback and input and experience, even and especially from 5th graders!

Now what?

Since that day in September, this team of teachers, school principal, and district staff have responded by going through a year-long design cycle. Their response hasn’t been to make wholesale changes or dictate final decisions that everyone must follow. Instead, they have been using the feedback they got from their community. They have been working to better understand what students need from their middle school to be successful, to be prepared for high school, and to become the best version of themselves.

Hinsdale’s interest in Bravely grew out of a community-wide effort to create a Hinsdale Portrait of a Learner to express the skills and abilities that the Hinsdale community agrees students need to develop in school. At first, the team wanted to explore this Brave Question: How might the middle school revolutionize learning to align to this new portrait?

But by starting with those most directly connected—the students themselves, their families, and their teachers and counselors—on that September day, they uncovered so many bright spots, strengths they knew they could build on. Here are a few examples:

• Students were able to answer why they are learning what they are learning in their classes, and students were asking to be challenged more.

• People they talked to seemed excited about being able to have a voice and participate in creating a better learning environment.

• The community was overall positive and hopeful about the Portrait of a Learner skills and the process used to develop it and the opportunity for change.

Reflecting on all the information they gathered that day, the Bravely team came to understand that what everyone really wanted was to improve the student experience in middle school. As one team member commented, “We got much more specific in our question by focusing on what we really wanted to improve (student experience in middle school). Once we all rallied around that goal, our progress sped up.”

The team has since refined their Brave Question to guide their next steps in the design cycle: How do we shift to student-centered and community-based learning in middle school?

Guided by their Brave Question, the team brainstormed several change ideas, something to try with a small number of people over a short period of time to see how it goes. This is what Peter Sims calls a little bet, although the Bravely Hinsdale team’s change idea might be more accurately called a medium-sized bet! They wanted to find ways to design learning around students’ interests and passions. And so, two teachers are planning and running an interdisciplinary project-based unit for 6th grade students.

This is another brave moment for the Hinsdale team. They are trying something new and they are inviting their community to learn alongside them. In Bravely, we have two side-by-side goals for teams that are trying a change idea.

1. First, Bravely teams are making a change in the learning experience, and they will seek to find out how well it worked. Hinsdale will be reflecting on questions like these: What did students learn across disciplines and how well did they develop targeted skills? Did students say they were engaged and actively participating in the learning process? How different was this learning experience from typical lessons/units at the middle school? How could the project be improved to work even better?
2. Second, teams are learning what is needed for change to be successful. The Hinsdale team also will be gathering information to answer questions like these: How and when did the teachers collaborate? What conditions and resources were needed to pull it off, everything from time to supplies to policies? What got in the way and how did they address it? How could they improve the process and the conditions?

While they are still working on their project-based unit, here are a few of the Hinsdale team’s recent reflections on what they are learning about themselves and their community:

“It has been encouraging to learn that most people are open to and ready for change—even if it's scary to delve into the unknown.”

“I have been thinking more about my HIGH5 strength as a coach and how central that is to my role.”

“It would be great to have students more involved in the work throughout the process—it would help us create a structure for continuously engaging our most important stakeholders.”

“We have worked very hard to ensure that the people that are directly involved in this new idea are directly involved in identifying barriers and solutions to help us move this idea forward. We have been intentional in engaging those stakeholders to ensure no top down initiatives are implemented.”

As the team studies their change idea and considers what’s next, they still won’t make wholesale changes or dictate final decisions that everyone must follow. There are still many questions to answer, and the only people who can answer them are once again in their community: students, families, teachers, school and district staff, and partners.

To move forward from this stage of their design process, the Bravely Hinsdale team needs their community to help answer questions like these: How might an interdisciplinary project be successful in different classrooms, led by different teachers, focused on different subject areas, with students at different grade levels, during different times of the year? What might need to go away in order to create room for more interdisciplinary projects, and is that okay? Are there other change ideas that Hinsdale staff, students, and partners want to try, inspired by this one, that could help them answer their Brave Question? What challenges might need tending so the community can move forward together?

This team is Bravely acting on the feedback and input they got back in September, and they continue to be open to learn and grow and get better. We look forward to continuing to learn with them, and we know that the Hinsdale middle school students are the ones who will benefit the most from their efforts.

Photo at top: Ashuelot River in Hinsdale, New Hampshire, by Doug Kerr, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.