NORTHWEST
EDUCATION
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STEVENSVILLE, Montana—They work the room like a classic comedy team: Frank White, well over six feet tall, with a booming laugh and a gregarious nature that pulls in everyone around him; and Connor Warner, a decade younger and nearly a foot shorter, with a bookish intensity that is offset by a quick wit and a reputation for unpredictable bursts of youthful energy. As the students in their Advanced Placement American Studies class get to work on an end-of-year project—tracing a map of the world on a bare classroom wall—the two teachers move around the room as if working the stage in a crowded club.
“Beef jerky?” White asks, holding out a package to any student who approaches, catching many of them off guard. “Cheap Trick rocks!” he bellows down the hallway to another student, who shakes his head and smiles at their running joke about a rock band. White, who came to teaching after a 15-year career at a lumber mill, has the boundless enthusiasm of one who has found his true calling. Students feed off his energy and good humor, and also revel in the unconventional approach and real-world experience he brings to the classroom.
While Warner took a more conventional route to teaching, his style is equally his own. Sometimes brash, always opinionated, he challenges everyone around him to have equally strong opinions. There is a stubborn, independent, Thoreau-like quality about him, although it’s difficult to imagine Thoreau jumping up from his desk, running halfway up a wall, and springing away like a kung-fu master, as Warner has been known to do at any moment.
On the surface, the two might seem to have little in common, besides the wisecrack banter and madcap antics that draw the two together. But both won awards for excellence in preservice teaching—White for the western part of the state, Warner for the eastern—and both are able to push their students well beyond the limits of the average high school classroom.
Together, they are representative of the larger culture at Stevensville High School, where freewheeling fun meets serious discipline and the stereotype of a rural school with limited opportunities comes crashing down.
It was not always this way. Stevensville, Montana, is the proverbial one-horse town, much to the delight of most of its residents. A single main street cuts through the center of town and the few stoplights switch into blinking mode in the early evening. The typical Western mishmash of false-front buildings is home to mom and pop businesses and a few taverns. Grocery chain stores bracket each end of the town, but for most shopping needs residents must go south to Hamilton or 30 miles north to the “big city” of Missoula.
Just off Highway 93 in the stunning Bitterroot Valley, Stevensville has managed to weather the recent population boom better than many of the surrounding towns. The creeping subdivisions are having their effect, but for now the town still feels like an out-of-time oasis, hidden away between the craggy peaks of the Bitterroot Mountains to the west and the softer slopes of the Sapphire Range to the east. It’s hard to imagine a nicer place to grow up, but it does have its limitations. Until recently, getting a top-notch, challenging education that prepared a student for college was one of them.
Five years ago, Peggy Mullin, a counselor at Stevensville High School and the director of both the Advanced Placement (AP) and Extended Studies (Gifted and Talented) programs for the Stevensville School District, saw an opportunity to increase the rigor of the district’s curriculum. Mullin, stylish, well-spoken, and quick to laugh, had often gone to bat for both students and teachers who wanted to try something new. Originally brought on board to serve gifted students in grades 7-12, she had noticed that much of her time was spent serving high-potential but underachieving students who complained of boredom and the lack of interesting classes that pushed their abilities and fired their imaginations.
As she searched for alternatives, she also noticed that students applying to college were often asked what Advanced Placement classes they had taken. Traditionally, the school had offered honors classes, but had not participated in the nationally-recognized AP program, which allows high school students to earn college credit. “I realized we were kind of living in the Stone Age in that regard,” says Mullin. She also realized that the AP program provided exactly what the gifted but underachieving students at the school were missing.
At about this same time, a short note was passed on to Mullin that described new state subgrants being offered as part of the federal Advanced Placement Incentive Grant program. The purpose of the grant—to increase the access of low-income and rural students to challenging AP courses—was a perfect fit for the school. Already convinced of the necessity of providing AP classes, Mullin was thrilled that the school had the opportunity to jump into the program with the financial support it needed.
While far from being the poorest district in the state, Stevensville has its share of problems. Montana typically ranks among the bottom five states on several economic indicators. As Mullin says, “We have a lot of diversity here. Not just the geographical diversity—the rural issue—but economic diversity. A lot of our parents are unemployed or make close to minimum wage. A lot of them have very little education or at least no education after the high school level, which can really be an obstacle to creating a postsecondary education culture at the school.”
In addition to this, says Mullin, are the normal challenges of a rural district in a less than affluent state: cramped facilities, aging technology, tight budgets, and isolation from mainstream professional development opportunities.
When Mullin first proposed the creation of an Advanced Placement program to District Superintendent Dennis Kimzey, she was unsure how he would respond, but he immediately gave the program an enthusiastic green light. “His response was ‘A rising tide brings up all ships,’” says Mullin. It was to be a prophetic statement.
Mullin’s first step was to encourage some of the district’s strongest teachers to buy into the philosophy, rigor, and commitment required to launch the program. Here again she had an easy sell: Every department within the core curriculum had someone willing to get on board.
Initially, five teachers attended national College Board–certified professional development training sessions and the first five AP classes were soon added to the schedule. Several of the classes, such as Art IV, calculus, and Spanish IV, had previously been offered as honors classes and were expanded to cover the AP curriculum.
These initial classes were for seniors only, but the program soon spread like wildfire. In four short years, Stevensville has developed eight AP classes (open to any student in the school), student participation has nearly tripled, and the student pass rate on AP exams has continually improved.
As the program grew, Mullin began to see the value of the pre-AP training offered to middle school teachers, and to understand that vertical teaming was the best recipe for districtwide success.
Currently, middle school teachers receive training through SpringBoard, a comprehensive professional development program developed by College Board that offers everything from new pedagogical strategies to online mentors, curriculum alignment, diagnostic assessments, and a national community of peers that is a vital link for isolated, rural teachers. Mullin is ecstatic about the program, funded by the federal grant, and its potential influence on students. “SpringBoard really lays the foundation for our middle school students to succeed, not only in the AP classes we offer at the high school, but on into college.”
In 2003, Montana was one of a very few states to receive a second three-year incentive grant, and Stevensville was awarded another subgrant—money that not only allowed the program to grow, but also to head in some groundbreaking directions.
When Frank White and Connor Warner arrived at Stevensville High they immediately bought into the AP, college-preparatory culture at the school. Both teachers attended national and state AP training sessions and taught AP courses in that first year. Prior to their second year of teaching, the two attended an AP history training session together and began to compare notes. Both teachers have dual-endorsements in English and history, and both were having some misgivings about the history courses. Nationally, students have a lower success rate on AP history exams than in any other subject area, with only 17 to 18 percent of students scoring three or higher (on a five-point scale).
The two teachers shared their experiences teaching AP English classes. Each remarked on how complementary the English and history curricula seemed to be, and how much easier it would be to teach the two subjects together. “At first we talked about guest lecturing in each other’s classrooms,” says White, “and that quickly led to us developing some very parallel curriculum, at which point we said, ‘Well, why don’t we just try this and see how it goes?’”
Taking the leap, the two proposed that they combine AP English and AP history into a single two-hour, co-taught class called American Studies. To their amazement, the administration went for it. Undaunted by the difficulties in scheduling and staffing presented by a co-taught, two-hour block course, both Superintendent Kimzey and Principal Jim Notaro chose to put educational innovation above financial considerations. Without this administrative buy-in one of the most challenging and popular courses at the school would never have gotten off the ground.
The AP American Studies course was eventually offered to juniors—one of the school’s first AP classes at the junior level—and was a resounding success. Twelve of the 15 students scored a three or above on the AP English test, while five students reached a level three on the extremely demanding AP history test, a greater percentage than the national average.
For White, test scores tell only part of the story. Another view is suggested by one of his favorite anecdotes: the time a student had laminated the class notes in order to study in the shower. That kind of commitment, he says, is what the class demanded, and it’s what the students gave.
The dedication of all 15 students who took the class in the 2004-2005 school year (including one highly ambitious sophomore) was a validation not only for White and Warner, but also for Mullin, who has become a true believer in the power of the AP program. Its positive influence, she points out, goes far beyond the elite few. “The district has taken steps to vertically integrate the curriculum in all disciplines, so in that way it’s influencing all students. No matter what the subject area or the grade level, we’ve been ramping up the curriculum to ensure that students have the skills to succeed at the AP level and beyond.”
The school’s efforts have begun to attract widespread notice. The federal government has expressed interest in using Montana’s program as a national model for implementing Advanced Placement services in rural states, and Stevensville is front and center in those efforts. Mullin has accompanied the state director of the program, Kathleen Mollohan, to Washington, D.C., for a presentation, and the school is making a video that highlights the unique qualities of their program.
Back in the American Studies class on the second-to-last day of school, you can feel the camaraderie that has developed between the two teachers and their students. It has been an extraordinary experiment in learning, unlike anything the teachers or students have experienced before. As White says, “To be given this kind of opportunity is phenomenal—15 students, two teachers, cross-curricular integration for a two-hour block, every day? You just don’t get that kind of opportunity very often. It requires a lot of creativity as far as scheduling goes, and just a ton of support.” Both White and Warner freely acknowledge that support, passing out credit to Superintendent Kimzey, Principal Notaro, Mullin, the school board, their fellow teachers, and the community. And most of all, they credit their students for the willingness to take on such a challenging, time-consuming class.
The assignment to paint the world map on a classroom wall is a kind of end-of-the-year gift from White and Warner to these students—a fun and educational project that will also be a monument to the incredible amount of time and hard work they’ve put in. From college-level reading of such texts as John Stuart Mills’ On Liberty to intensive essay writing and indepth units on the Vietnam War, the students have exceeded even the high expectations of these two hard-working, very demanding teachers. But more important, it has helped the students develop a whole new set of expectations for themselves. In a very literal sense, it has taken them places they never knew they could go.
For more information about Advanced Placement Incentive Program Grants, see www.ed.gov/programs/apincent/index.html
Original URL: http://www.nwrel.org/nwedu/11-01/open/
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