The January 2021 Practitioner’s Guide to Next Gen Learning from NGLC spotlights some of the mindsets and practices used by the teachers at Barnstable Intermediate School in Massachusetts. These teachers are redesigning learning to promote student engagement, empowerment, and connections to each other and the wider community. The school-wide learning transformation is aligned to MyWays’ whole-person definition of success.

The Practitioner’s Guide shares stories from several teachers who are re-envisioning the curriculum, in spite of the pandemic, facilitating inclusive real-world learning projects, and connecting the school and the community… all to provide opportunities for students to develop a range of MyWays competencies, as demonstrated in these excerpts:

One of the five MyWays mindsets for transforming learning is “Invite the Community.” At BIS, this principle took the form of numerous town halls and community forums, where learners and adults shared their insights about the kind of school they wanted BIS to be. “We reached out, talked to them, did surveys, and looked at the data from outreach,” recalls Alicia [Roth, ESL teacher]. “What comment did we hear the most? People told us it was a big school.”

In addition to academic knowledge and skills, Mike [Andrews, ELA teacher] and his colleagues designed the [Village Poetry Walk] project to support development of MyWays competencies like positive mindsets around belonging, persistence, and believing that their work has value. “It was a lot of legwork,” Mike admits, “but how empowering to project yourself to an authentic audience? They were able to say ‘I am out there. I went to see my poem, and I saw other people looking at it, too.’”

Mary [Barth, choral director] notes that, “In a normal year, I might not have thought of veering away from my curriculum in this way.” At the same time, however, she is aware that her thinking about music education had begun to shift even before the pandemic. “The MyWays initiative has had a great impact. We’ve rethought the whole curriculum, especially in music. We follow the NAfME (National Association for Music Educators) standards, but I realize I can teach them any way I want.”

Read more in Nurturing Identity and Belonging in a Challenging Time by Amanda Avallone, originally published on January 22, 2021.