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LocationPayette Primary School ContactLee McBride, Teacher DescriptionLike many excellent teachers, Lee McBride doesn't do things in her classroom because someone told her to, or because some expert wrote about it. By her own admission, she teaches the way she does because it's the way she would want to learn. Learning is fun in her classroom. Not fun in a clichéd sense, but fun in a genuine kid kind of way. She knows that when kids enjoy learning, they are engaged in school. When preparing a lesson or unit for her third-grade class, she always asks herself questions like, "What do I want them to learn?" and "How do I want them to learn it?" She also considers what state and district standards require of her students, and with all this in mind, learning takes shape. Blessed with a flair for "making things," as she puts it and with a knack for classroom management, McBride blends learning and fun so that it is difficult to find where one ends and the other begins. Each year her third-grade classroom goes through a series of metamorphoses; sometimes it is the ocean, sometimes the rain forest, and sometimes the human body. For McBride, it's all about providing the students with an authentic context for learning. For example, geography is a required content focus for social studies in all Idaho third-grade classrooms. Though each classroom is provided textbooks necessary to study the subject, McBride prefers her students to experience geography through the eyes of migrating whales. By studying the migratory routes of five different whales, students learn about the continents of the world and the countries within them. They understand the placement of the oceans and the directions whales take in their annual trips from one end of the globe to the other. This theme is easily extended to science and math as students learn specific behavior of whales, study their growth, and chart their progress. In fact one larger-than-life activity McBride does each year with her students is a life-size drawing of the world's largest whale, the Blue Whale, which is 100 feet long. Together the children cut out the enormous creature and then make it available for the entire school to view. When studying the human body, students and teacher don medical scrubs (donated by a local hospital), and they all assume doctor identities, going by "Doctor" pseudonyms and addressing each other that way throughout the unit. They learn about the body, organ by organ, by placing cutouts of each organ on a life-size tracing of themselves. They read about the body in their daily literature and they write about the body. Admittedly, creating a learning environment like this is incredibly time-consuming, but this 10-year veteran of Idaho's teacher workforce can't think of any other way she would want to do it. To her, it is the natural way to lead students. She starts at the beginning of the year by creating a community within the classroom. This is done first by everyone getting to know one another. McBride and the students "bond" by sitting together in a circle to talk about what they did over the summer or about their favorite foods. McBride says, "We trust, we cooperate, we come to consensus, we become a community. We allow others to take risks without being laughed at." And she makes sure students know that she is consistent with all discipline. "I let them know I will never wear down an inch," she says. Simple rules are also established:
Like many small, rural communities Payette is supported largely by agricultural industries. It is by no means an affluent community, in fact, 63 percent of students in McBride's school qualify for free and reduced-priced lunch, and a high percentage of students are from migrant families, thus creating a high ESL population in the school. These factors would make many classify students at Payette Primary as "high risk," but that's not how Lee McBride sees them. They are just students to her and she expects them all to excel. And she expects parents to be a part of the experience as well. She readily acknowledges that she could never do such in-depth studies in her classroom without the assistance of many parents. By keeping in touch with parents on a regular basis, through handwritten post cards and phone calls, she maintains a very supportive parent base. Consequently, even though she is considered to be a strict teacher, parents continually request that their children be placed in her class. Student engagement is high in McBride's classroom not just because learning is fun, though that is what the students might tell you. Just as any world-class athlete can make a complicated sport look effortless, so too does a good teacher make daily learning flow in the classroom. McBride spends hours behind the scenes structuring the learning environment so that it never appears to be overly structured, yet students move from one activity to the next with relative ease. They know the routine and they know what is expected of them. They know they are to be serious about learning, but they also know that learning is fun. Observed Outcomes
Keys to Success
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