During these last 17 years, I have been teaching adults who want to improve their lives with a GED or improved English skills so they can find better paying jobs or go to college or trade school. These adults and their families have directly benefited from me having taught at Clear Spring School.
Clear Spring School is where I acquired my teaching philosophy. I was not issued a large stack of textbooks to plow through with my primary students every year. I was encouraged to be creative in my teaching plans, engage students in the planning, and evaluate their learning in resourceful ways.
Each year I could plan curriculum based on generalized Arkansas teaching standards, students’ needs, my creativity, and the whole child. I was the learner right along with the students. I was learning how to teach.
This philosophy of learning embraced everyone on the CSS campus. These principles include:
- Children learn best by doing.
- Children love to learn if given the chance to explore and be an active part in the decisions of their education.
- Children gain a greater sense of community and self-confidence when they understand and help others inside and outside their classroom.
- Each child is unique and the way each child learns is unique.
- Children deserve respect and, consequently, learn to give respect.
- The teacher’s role is to broaden the students’ awareness of their world, teaching them that understanding different people and viewpoints is central to being well-adjusted and flexible.
- The teacher’s role is to awaken the “I can” in every child, challenging each student’s strengths and supporting their weaknesses.
These principles influenced me every year to develop an integrated, multisensory curriculum and environment that
was success oriented. I took these principles into the adult education classroom, substituted the word “children” with “student,” and found this to be successful no matter a student’s age.
Why I Loved Teaching at Clear Spring School
Every spring when decision time came around about whether to return to CSS or choose to teach in a public K-12 classroom, I repeatedly choose CSS, 17 times. I had so much fun teaching 1st and 2nd graders in an environment that I knew benefited a child’s natural growth and learning styles.
These young students got to play outside three times a day to develop imagination and creativity while learning to get along with their fellow students. Spontaneity allowed students to discover an interesting insect during recess launching a study with observations, drawings, and creative stories about their discovery.
We walked to the Carnegie Public Library once a month and checked out books.
Each year, the student would choose a favorite tree in the playground to investigate, sketch monthly, and make a book about it. Besides scientific studies with gerbils in the classroom, we had creative writing, quiet reading time and would close the day with story time.
Rather than issuing report cards to grade 1-6 students, narratives were written detailing how a student was performing and advancing, which was shared in a quarterly face-to-face meeting with the student and parents. These students learned conflict resolution protocols to use with each other. I witnessed these children growing, changing, creating, and stretching into individuals who felt empowered by their own uniqueness while accepting others.
A significant advantage of being a teacher at Clear Spring School was being encouraged to take students “On the Road.” CSS students live in the northwest corner of Arkansas and are unfamiliar with other parts of their state. Most of the students came from homes in the lower to middle economic range, so their travel experiences were limited to one hour from home or a vacation out of state.
To learn about the diversity of people and regions in Arkansas, it is essential to take them there with the encouragement and support of administration and parents. Realizing this opportunity is impossible in most educational settings, Clear Spring School launched another unique learning opportunity, The Travel School, and discovered how vital educational travel is to expanding minds and attitudes.
With the Upper Middle students (grades 7 and 8), I presented an Arkansas Studies curriculum unit that could last for 12 weeks, integrating all the subject areas: science, math, writing, reading, history, geography, and social skills. The plan was to study different geographic regions each year.
The purpose of this study was for students to learn about the diversity of Arkansas: culturally, geographically, economically, and historically; and to learn researching, planning, journaling, interviewing, observing, cooperating, and presenting. Believing that students learn best “by being there” experiences, we went “On the Road” twice a year for at least six days.
Before we traveled, students gathered information from individual research, group studies, and experts in that particular field. Integrating writing and reading with the history and geography involved in the studies, I tried to reach each student’s unique learning style and interest.
Students helped make decisions and plan fundraising, so everyone had the same opportunities. With parents and administration cheering us on, our classroom became much broader than four walls.
The students kept travel journals in which they wrote notes, glued brochures and souvenirs, and answered predetermined questions with a rubric. They learned to use their “Geographer’s Eyes” by looking at different landscapes. They asked historical questions and interviewed local citizens. They considered the economics and culture of each location. Upon returning, the class created a performance piece or product to illustrate their learning.
Specifically, they learned how to learn – researching and asking good questions – organize their learning, present and record learning, and analyze and evaluate their learning experiences. Each student synthesized new ideas and concepts, making it possible to transfer knowledge to new situations.
One of my favorite trips (1999) involved the Arkansas Delta region. The Upper Middle class embarked on an in-depth, integrated study of The Delta, African American contributions to Arkansas’ history, and the origin of “The Blues.”
Students drew a map of Arkansas from memory and labeled everything they knew about the state without the benefit of books or maps. Next, they wrote, in paragraph form, everything they knew, or thought they knew, about the Arkansas Delta and its history.
At the end of the study, they did the same thing to evaluate their learning. The class visited a University of Arkansas history professor specializing in “Blues” history and taught us to recognize the standard 12-bar blues. For research, we studied different blues artists and wrote blues lyrics in our poetry studies.
A blues singer/guitarist came to our class and put our lyrics to music. We studied the economy of the Arkansas Delta and its effects on the history of the people living there.
Earth science studies taught the students how the Mississippi River formed the Mississippi Alluvial Plain. Students chose topics about The Delta and African Americans to research and present to the class. Lessons learned on writing good interview questions and videotaping helped us document our trip. The students raised money to take the trip so everyone in the class could afford to go. To help every dollar count, we willingly slept in sleeping bags in local churches, camps, and community spaces.
During the trip, the students attended the King Biscuit Blues Festival in Helena, Arkansas, on the Mississippi River. The students videotaped and interviewed a 100-year-old woman and visited a working cotton gin in one of the poorest counties in the nation. We traveled to Little Rock for further study at Central High School, where we learned about the 1957 events surrounding the Little Rock Nine and their attempt to attend that school.
Students were assessed by their completed journals, giving a presentation, and completing a writing assignment which consisted of a newspaper article, a comparative research paper, or a test. The students’ evaluative results powerfully demonstrated the value of “being there.”
My expected outcomes were for students to ask questions, record their learning, relate learning to real life, and present what they learned. I was pleased with the academic success of these outcomes. On a grander scale, students learned appreciation and pride in the diversity and beauty of their state.
Collectively and individually, they are different because of this study, as am I.
[CSS is celebrating its 50th year in Eureka Springs and ESI is showcasing teacher and student anthologies to commemorate the accomplishment.]