The Times, They Are A-Changin'

The Times, They Are A-Changin’

With the start of a new year, new policies surprise students

BY ELLA KRUG

Last spring, confusion surrounded pruject-based learning (PBL) and personalized learning (PL) for both students and parents alike.

Valley parents voiced their concerns over the implementation of the approach, some even participating in a protest outside of the school. Students worried over how their academic careers would turn out under this new educational system.

This misconceptions that have plagued the community may all have been caused by a lack of communication.

Administration has worked over the summer to come up with a new school management system including a few schedule changes, new rooms and different duties for some staff members.

“We’ve really worked on improving our communication with families and making sure that our message is clear about what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and how we’re doing it,” assistant principal Bill Gulgert said.

This is what students and parents can expect for the 2019-20 school year.

Personalized Learning, Project-Based Learning

Powerpoint. Powerpoint. Quiz. Test. This process is all too familiar to high school students all over the country, and it has forced many who have grown tired of this type of education system to look for non-traditional forms of schooling.

Administrators and principals all over the county have recognized that problem and want to appeal to millennial students who are hungry for alternative methods of education. Thus, personalized learning was born. Principal Sue Ross prefers to refer to this method as 21st-century learning because the world has changed so much with the arrival of advanced technology and the internet. Schools have come to the conclusion that they need to adapt to the changing world to support a new wave of 21st-century adolescents.

The whole goal of 21st-century learning is to push students to think critically. Ross has acknowledged the reality of students struggling through Powerpoint after Powerpoint and how

it doesn’t positively impact students the way it should.

“That doesn’t have you guys thinking critically,” she said. “It has you doing knowledge and understanding that knowledge and maybe even applying it on a multiplechoice test.”

Twenty-firstcentury learning is supposed to push students’ skills even further by teaching them to analyze, evaluate, and synthesize. The goal is to embed thinking skills into everything students do. These skills are vital to get students through college. “What college professors say is their frustration is that college freshmen come to them with opinions but not really being able to state a position and back it up with facts,” Ross said. This is what administrators and faculty were seeing last year at Valley. It was all about spun-up opinions and no facts.

Ross and fellow administrators have been very supportive of teachers at Valley when it comes to 21st century learning, advising them to take baby steps or just dip their toes in. “I’ve never insisted that teachers go slam full into anything,” Ross said. “There are a couple teachers who are struggling a little bit with it, and we support them. We don’t hammer teachers any more than we hammer kids.”

So how is personalized learning being implemented at Valley, and who came to that decision? Loudoun County Public Schools is supporting schools using it as an initiative, and other schools in the county are applying for the training. Valley is one of them.

Three other high schools utilizing this system are Tuscarora, Heritage and Park View. Ross said Stone Bridge has also come on board this year.

Middle schools are testing Project-Based Learning (PBL), a teaching method where students work on a project over an extended period of time that engages them in solving a problem. Tabs on middle schools’ websites describe the new education initiative. Part of Ross’s rationale was that if students were coming up from middle schools exposed to PBL, then Valley should be ready.

Ross has talked to a number of Valley alumni about how college is going, to which those past students remark how difficult the year has been in terms of managing their time. Project-Based Learning is supposed to help students plan those timelines by picking a project and planning it out themselves with the facilitation and support of the teacher. College students have stated that their ability to plan and get tasks completed sooner so they’re not as stressed is because they lack experience with Project-Based Learning. “The idea of this kind of learning got confused and conflated with the greater freedoms that we gave you guys last year,” Ross said.

As parents protested against this new learning style, they also associated it with the supposed lack of safety in the school and kids always being in the hallways, where they were collaborating.

In addition to PBL, there is also a personalized learning initiative, the point of which is to make students take more initiative to get work done and be more involved with Sophomore Keira Anderson has her English class in one of the Flexible Learning Spaces. photo | Alison Pike “I know e-hallpass was a shock to upperclassmen.” Principal Sue Ross

their classes. They are in charge of what they want to achieve.

“Personalized learning is not independent learning. That may be an option for a student who says they learn better visually rather than listening to a lecture,” Ross said. “It offers students and teachers a choice about how the learning gets into the brain and about how the learning then is expressed in terms of assessment.”

Gulgert emphasizes that personalized learning is just another tool a teacher can employ to help students succeed.

“I think it was portrayed as something that it’s really not,” Gulgert said. “We want teachers to work more directly with kids in smaller groups and more individually. That is an aspect of personalized learning.” Flexible Learning Spaces Students may have a class or two in particular classrooms that look starkly different from the others. There are tables of different heights and modern furniture, and the room has a clean, gray aesthetic. Other classrooms are furnished with leather couches and loveseats. These rooms are aptly called Flexible Learning Spaces. “What we’re trying to do is give students and teachers more space to be able to learn because a big push this year is having people collaborate more,” Gulgert said. “I think the way we’re looking at flexible spaces is the ability to do many different things with large and small groupings.” These rooms go hand in hand with personalized learning. They’re supposed to push the teachers to not do as much stand-and-deliver instruction. Instead, teachers can work oneon-one with students so they get more feedback.

Superintendent Eric Williams provided six Flexible Learning Spaces, and the PTO lent two more.

“I love it,” English teacher Shea Finny said. “I think because we can change the classroom seating no matter what we’re doing, it just offers the kids so many more options for their learning style.”

Teachers in these rooms are given a small, moveable desk that they can shift around the room to work directly with kids. However, they don’t have a traditional desk with drawers that one might find in other classrooms.

“It’s not an issue because it’s baggage for me,” Finny said. “It’s just one more thing to hold me to a certain spot in the classroom, whereas I need to be up and moving and with the kids all the time.” Students seem to be in favor of the Flexible Learning Spaces, too.

“I think the kids are more comfortable,” Finny said. “I think it feels less sterile here, and I think it just creates a more homey atmosphere. Plus, I just have different options for them as far as working in groups or working individually.” Viking Time

Before school started, when a copy of the new schedule was posted, Valley students went into a frenzy. Where is Prime? This new schedule sucks! Kids were surprised and a little disappointed to see that they would go to first block first, and then there would be a period of Viking Time afterwards, which is equivalent to what Prime was last year. They were used to having Prime in the beginning of the day and were shocked to see this change.

Ross revealed that the administration sent out a survey over the summer to parents, teachers and students about the status of Prime.

The results were mixed. Admin looked into why some people said not to change Prime. The responses revealed that students used it to ease into their day, and teachers used the period for planning. According to Ross, that time was never meant for either one of those things. “That time was originally for students working with teachers to get caught up, to make up a test, or to get help on a concept they don’t understand,” Ross said. “It’s not for planning or for easing into the day. So because the people who did not want us to change it were using reasons that it wasn’t meant for is what helped us decide to go ahead and change it.”

One hundred students replied to the survey, and the vast majority wanted admin to leave Prime where it was, but for reasons it wasn’t meant for in the first place. Sophomore Sadie Cooper listens as her teacher lectures in the Flexible Learning Space. photo | Alison Pike

Some teachers gave feedback to Ross that they should go into the day right away with classes and then have a break after. “The idea was it would be easier to refocus what the time is really about by changing the time during the day,” Ross said.

E-hallpass and New Teacher Duties Among the new implementations that gained strongest, and mixed, reactions is e-hallpass. Students were surprised by the change, and staff took on new duties.

“We’ve had to give every teacher in the building a longer duty than what they’ve been used to so that we can have the bathroom areas manned as well as some of the open areas, like the Mixing Bowl and the Viking Head,” Gulgert said.

Administration implemented these two new methods to combat the wave of safety concerns that were brought up last year by parents.

e-hall pass has faced student opposition since the school year started. Complaits include its inability to work consistently on phones and the burden of teachers keying in codes when students leave or return to class.

“I know e-hallpass was a shock to upperclassmen, and at the same time everybody’s taken it in stride. Typical Viking stride,” Ross said. “As I was told by teachers the other day, most students have settled in.”

There are many questions regarding if e-hallpass will stay, but according to Gulgert, it’s helped administration gather data, but they’ve just scratched the surface. “We only have about a month’s worth of data,” Gulgert said. “We haven’t really spent a lot of time analyzing it other than which teachers are giving passes more frequently, which kids are using passes more frequently and how long are the kids using the passes for.”

Ross has also stated that staff is more supportive of the changes than she’d expected them to be.

“We are meeting with them regularly to try to make sure that from an admin perspective, we’re making things as supportive as possible,” Ross said.

The feedback Ross has gotten from teachers and parents is positive and there have been no recent complaints about safety.

“I think everybody is in agreement with preparing seniors for their next adventure,” Gulgert said. “We’ve just got to figure out how to do that and how to make sure that everybody knows you guys are safe.”