Laramie County teachers discuss how to change education

Feb. 22—CHEYENNE — Teachers constantly need to adapt to students' changing educational needs, and the ways students learned in the past aren't always the best ways for them to learn now.

That's why Laramie County School District 1 and eight other districts in Wyoming have adopted Gov. Mark Gordon's Reimagining and Innovating the Delivery of Education (RIDE) program. A handful of teachers in LCSD1 have tested out changing the way student success is measured by implementing project-based learning in their classrooms.

"When I was coming in, I got out of my truck today and I didn't anticipate the weather," said James Fraley, LCSD1's assistant superintendent of instruction, at the start of a celebration of the completion of loop one of the RIDE initiative in the LCSD1 Administration Building on Thursday. "I saw that I have two paths that I can take, and it reminded me of the Robert Frost poem 'The road less traveled.' I had one that (had) no snow on it yet, and the other one had snow on it. ... I'm gonna be bold, today is the day to be bold and walk across this — a little icy, a little treacherous. I did have to take smaller steps, and I wasn't feeling very sure of myself.

"That's kind of what I think our teachers have gone through, somewhat, and what our students have gone through."

The program was done in partnership with the national educational consulting firm 2Revolutions, whose staff hosted the LCSD1 celebration, along with several others across the state.

"We are the technical partner supporting this work around the state," said 2Revolutions founder Adam Rubin, "and just so excited to be here. ... I think what's unique about this initiative (is that) it's tougher to wrap your head around, because there is no cookbook recipe for helping to transform districts. If there is, I'd love to see it, because I don't think it exists. I think this work has really been about listening to districts and where they are and trying to customize a program of support to take them to a more student-centered approach."

Five educators presented the results of their work with the RIDE project, which they began working on in late 2023. The event was a chance for teachers who worked on the project to tell officials, like State Superintendent of Public Instruction Megan Degenfelder and LCSD1 Superintendent Stephen Newton, how the RIDE program impacted their teaching.

Each educator's presentation highlighted the unique ways they approach teaching their students and how they try to meet students where they are.

The first teacher to present, high school psychology teacher Liz Edington, described the way she incorporated new projects to measure students' aptitudes. These projects — as all RIDE projects intend to do — are meant to grade students on performance and be more engaging than a standardized test.

Her students were given files on several cultural figures, like former Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, who some psychologists say are thought to have been dealing with mental illness. The students were given a brief biography and asked to come up with a potential diagnosis for that person backed by their own reasoning and suppositions. She said this proved to be a fruitful and engaging activity for her students, stimulating them in way traditional, test-based education often can't.

"The nutrition for a teacher ... is thinking about students and thinking about the work that we get to do and the people that we get to do it with," she said, adding that work on resourceful, creative thinking can be an empowering tool for training their students for the world. "This will give me the confidence, as a parent, that (my children) are going to be prepared for whatever life throws at them, as much as education can."

A common thread among all the presenters at the event was putting faith in the intellectual curiosity of students and giving them the space to reason like an adult in the "real world" would. To that end, Edington's presentation also featured two of her students in her Advanced Placement psychology class, who spoke openly about the positive and negative aspects of the class. While they said many students largely thrived in an open-ended, subjective environment, they noted that some students felt the added pressure to produce a larger project and found the style stressful.

The next speaker, high school history teacher Danielle Michael, described how she tried to incorporate students' artistic tendencies into her instruction on the civil rights movement. Students were asked to design a monument to a civil rights figure or event. She said the task, which students only had a short window of time to complete, got her small class to relate to history in a new way and gave them the opportunity to access their creative side.

"They were very, honestly, like tortured artist kids," Michael said. "I knew that they each would have their own vision and they wanted to keep that vision."

In their own way, each of the other teachers, high school teachers Truman Essex, Tom Bradley and Shannon Hall, described how their approach to project-based learning showed their commitment to their students. Many of the teachers, one attendee said, implemented projects in curriculum already, but not to the extent the RIDE program intends. Rubin, and district staff, said they hope the program will expand in the future, incorporating more teachers at LCSD1.

Rubin also said that he hoped that the project-based approach of RIDE would extend into a statewide, and nationwide, educational movement.

Samir Knox is the Wyoming Tribune Eagle's criminal justice and public safety reporter. He can be reached by email at sknox@wyomingnews.com or by phone at 307-633-3152. Follow him on Twitter at @bySamirKnox.