On September 9th, Steve, Kathleen, and I got the opportunity to meet with the 6th and 7th grade teams at Peterstown. Exciting things are happening in our schools all over the state, and we think it is important to capture some of that work.

One takeaway the sixth grade team had from their major heritage project last year was the role that their contracts played in the collaboration and work ethic of their teams. From the outset as they were developing their project, they planned how they would use the contracts with intentionality. They recognized that the design process planner was a way to help their students identify how they would use time and hold one another accountable.

The teachers established the teams with an eye for balance in many respects. They divided students with high, medium, and low academic performance throughout the teams, and each team had a student who was in music class and one who was in art class. They also separated students who have a history of conflict or behavior issues with one another. Students then established roles for the members of their team including writing job descriptions for those roles.

Teresa Harris stated that, “the use of contracts worked exactly like we thought it should. We went over roles first before they were broken out into teams- what the five roles were responsible for. Everybody had a role that they chose, and the students chose how to cover if somebody wasn’t there. We did not ask them to do this, they took it one step further than we suggested.” Darla Ellison stated that, “One child who took over the facilitator role when the leader was absent was really backward, a slow worker, and had low self-confidence. He took over and kept kids on task. Of all the things that we did, that was the major impact of this project- it gave him confidence. I’d never seen that until we got in this- he felt confidence in himself.”

Teresa, Darla, and Patti suggested that the contract was really the lifeblood of their teams’ work. The way their project was designed, there could have been days between work sessions where students were not working on this project. The planner and the contract helped them identify exactly where they were in their work flow and pick up where they left off. The contracts also helped them measure soft skills throughout the project.

Teachers also identified ways they have seen growth in students as they have worked last year as sixth graders and this year as seventh graders. They noted that their test scores are higher than expected and higher than typical. They reflected that their increase in scores seems to be affected by their effort, ownership, and pride. Patti, who works both with sixth and seventh grade, has also observed that the depth of examples and discussion they are having in their seventh grade classes about finance seem to be influenced by their experiences in sixth grade.