Rachael Le Mee, Post #4: Monarch and Drayton Mills Visits

What a MAGICAL day it was visiting Monarch and Drayton Mills and getting to enjoy lunch with you guys!

Here are my takeaways from the day....

Monarch: It DOES exist!!! A place where PBL is the norm, students are driven by engagement, learning is meaningful, and teachers are all teaching with the same mission despite the differing content in every grade level. What I think I enjoyed most about this day was getting to hear from the teachers first about the good, the bad, and the ugly of "true life PBL" then see it in action as we walked around the building. I loved how in every class we entered, students were working on completely different things, but were equally engaged because their learning held so much purpose for them. Their learning was always building towards something, and the engaging work they were doing was part of a process, not a culminating activity. I also noted, and particularly enjoyed, that the furnishings in the school were developmentally appropriate and easy to move for a variety of collaboration experiences in each classroom. One of my biggest takeaways was from my discussion with the principal: I realized that, if a school really wants to be PBL and do it well, the teachers need time for professional development, and it needs to be consistent across the school. And the leader has to MAKE time for that to happen and allocate resources for that to happen. How much easier would it have been to have inherited all these "excessed" teachers and just let them teach how they'd always been teaching? But, by making a commitment to PBL as a school, everyone benefits and teachers and students alike are both growing!

Drayton Mills: What I really learned at Drayton Mills more than anything is that becoming a PBL school is a long, slow process. You can slap the letters on the wall and on the website, announcing it to the world, but the actuality is that it takes time to develop PBL greatness. It's crazy to see the beginning phase at Drayton and well-oiled machine phase at Monarch, and it was incredibly beneficial to see them in the same day! What I really loved was that so many teachers at Drayton were able to have the attitude and acceptance that this process was going to be slow, but they trusted that they were all going to get there eventually. (This is something that is particularly hard for me, as I want to have the skills down, like, YESTERDAY.) Something that I think will be incredibly impactful about Drayton is the foresight that went into their building design. It is truly designed to be a place of innovation, imagination, and creativity where students and faculty have spaces to come together collaboratively.

Tons of great takeaways from this experience, and so thankful to have been able to be a part of it!