“Optics are really interesting, more than the War of 1812,” declared Joe Curran, a senior at Minnesota New Country School in Henderson, in the spring of 2008. Curran had just completed a 300-hour project on holograms, an assignment he found more worthy of his time than a stuffy old war. And that’s just fine by Dee Thomas, one of the school’s founders and an instructor there.
“I want kids to find real value in what they learn. Before I started teaching here, my students would ask ‘Why do I have to do this?’ and sometimes you couldn’t explain it to them,” says Thomas, who thought giving kids more say in what they learn would have big benefits, not least of which is better college preparation. “If kids really could get into a project and do something they were passionate about, it would cut down on discipline issues, keep them going for long times rather than checking out, and make them responsible for their own learning.”
Project-based learning
Back in the early 1990s, Thomas and some like-minded parents and teachers got together to discuss creating a new kind of school: It would have no bells, no classes, and no principal. “We talked about things that didn’t work well for us in traditional systems,” says Thomas. “For me, 42 minutes was not long enough to do anything. I felt like I was saying, ‘Sorry, shut your brains off and go to the next classroom.’” Instead of using the typical class structure, Thomas wanted kids to tackle self-assigned projects.
That learning format — called project-based learning — would also be good preparation for college, where students often carry more responsibility when managing time, choosing classes, and performing research.
At New Country, students write proposals for projects and must get teacher approval before beginning. A certain number of projects — with a prescribed number of hours to be spent on each — is required in each grade. While kids choose the topics to research, teachers (or “advisers,” as they are called) help sculpt the project so that the topic touches on many areas of learning, such as math, science, and history.
As just the seventh charter school in the nation (Minnesota was the first state to pass a charter school law, in 1991), Minnesota New Country School was essentially creating its own rule book, a pioneering path that Thomas admits was rough. “We truly had no idea what we were doing because we were setting the groundwork,” she explains. Today that groundwork is firmly in place, and New Country is situated on Main Street in Henderson in a unique new building that houses 125 students in grades 6–12.
Inside the building, which has a giant silo at its center, is a large open room with clusters of desks and tables where students of all grade levels mingle — an idea you might think would cause conflict. Thomas credits the strong bonds between grade levels to the fact that project-based learning eliminates discipline issues. “Most problems are caused by kids being bored, and here you’re only bored if choose to be,” she explains. “You’re not bored if you’re doing something you’re passionate about.”
The path to college
When Terri Collins enrolled her daughter, Casey Coakley, at New Country School in the eighth grade, she never expected the now-17-year-old would get the chance to take classes at both Gustavus Adolphus College and Mankato State University. “New Country School was a little more aggressive about giving her the opportunity for post-secondary enrollment options,” says Collins. “I wouldn’t have thought of it — it was the school that brought it up to Casey.”
While statewide, 68 percent of Minnesota’s high school graduating class of 2006 attended a postsecondary institution, 88 percent of New Country’s most recent graduates went on to college. Collins attributes these numbers to the project-based curriculum, which she suggests allows students to find a focus before even setting foot on a college campus.
“A lot of the time you hear that a senior project helps the student choose exactly what they want to do, or it helps them decide that a certain topic isn’t what they are interested in,” says Collins. “These kids seem to find themselves so much easier than a lot of students who change majors three or four times. They have focus and aren’t floundering when they get to college.”
Curran agrees. “In high school they teach you everything you might need to know, not the stuff you want to know.” While Curran worked on his large senior project on holograms, he called on professors from Gustavus Adolphus College as resources, which proved such a positive experience that Curran chose to attend Gustavus Adolphus this fall and focus on the type of physics he researched for his project. As for the War of 1812? His work at
New Country tells him that he may end up studying it… but only “if it’s applicable.”
Monica Wright is assistant editor of Minnesota Parent.
