Northway School

Here are just a few observations in no particular order: 

So. One teacher I observed's background is in English. And she has strong familial ties to Northway Village, making her a valuable link to the community for the school. She teaches Journalism, Alaska Studies, Math, English, and Life Science, in that order, for grades 8 through 12. It's the same schedule every day. It's a tough job. Most of her students are consistently getting failing grades. 

The number of students in her class fluctuates from day to day from between 5 to 10. The kids have Chromebooks to use for research and to write and to do math assignments through Khan Academy. They also have science textbooks to use for their Life Science coursework. When I was observing, most of the kids' time was intended to be seatwork time. They were almost entirely silent for several hours. But few seemed to be doing any actual work on their assignments, and that was apparently the norm. 

What I also did not see were any of the scaffolding strategies we've been talking about this last year and I've seen in every other class I've observed.  There were no Think Alouds, no Pre-Teaching Vocabulary, no Tapping Into Prior Knowledge, no Giving Time to Talk, no Think-Pair-Share, and expectations for assignments were almost always incredibly, irritatingly, excruciatingly unclear.  

Those same students stay in those same seats in that same classroom all day, with a handful of 5 minute breaks and a 30 minute lunch break somewhere round the middle. Unless their grades are all good, then the kids will get a break for gym during fifth hour, the period before Life Science. That's a great chance for them to go burn off steam and shoot hoops in the gym, a chance for exercise and a change of scenery. But if their grades are all bad, as they typically are and have been for as long as anybody remembers, the kids are required to stay in those same seats, in that very same classroom, All. Day. Long. Imagine that.  

On the other hand, the elementary through 7th grade kids get several opportunities to exercise and run around, chasing each other screaming at the tops of their lungs. They are invited to stay active during their numerous breaks in the day, and they are kept intellectually and physically stimulated through station work in the classroom. They're even given a physical outlet when they're expected to remain semi-sedentary for lengthier amounts of time. Here's a cool thing I call a bike-desk that kids use during their math and science classes...  

bike-desk

Our trip to Northway has reaffirmed my belief that the proper use of blended learning strategies with distance learning as a focus is key to education's survival in our far flung rural communities. Alaska's university system and especially hub communities' schools need to step up to provide more learning opportunities to students in our rural villages. At the bare minimum we need to be finding ways (and the funding) to offer more outreach, and we absolutely must get the necessary technology out to rural schools, ensure that it works, and make damn sure that everybody in the school knows how to work it (i.e. lots and lots of training and retraining and teaching our teachers).

I'll mention here that I spent some time doing vocabulary review and testing with the middle schoolers' Language Arts class. It was explained to me that one of the major struggles at Northway School is developing kids' reading skills. There'd be pictures of me doing some work with the students there but Jonny was probably off somewhere playing with poop* when he should've been taking pictures. 

If you're still reading along, it's just after lights out here in Eagle. My sleeping pad is in a gymnasium full of crazy boys. I'm writing this from the kitchen. We got in to Eagle this afternoon after an almost 7 hour ride through an absurdly spectacular and remote section of the eastern Interior. We are 8 miles from the Canadian border. Jonny and I came in a van with Northway's principal and 6 of Northway's really, truly wonderful students to check out a motivational basketball player named Jesse LeBeau. Jesse came to Eagle to motivate kids and play basketball, and he did both very well. This trip has been amazing.  










*Please read Jonny's blog for context.