by Grace Rubenstein
AUDIO SLIDE SHOW: Lawrence Township
Narrated by Grace Rubenstein
It is one thing to create change inside a classroom -- the best teachers,
masters of their one-room domains, break from tradition and foster innovative
learning environments all the time. A harder task, which a growing number of
schools are proving can be done, is to convert an entire school to embrace new
practices that fulfill the changing educational demands of our age. Then comes
the next -- and the messiest -- frontier, the entity most resistant to cohesive
change: the school district.
Five years ago, administrators in the Metropolitan School District of Lawrence Township, in the
northeast corner of Indianapolis, tackled this challenge. With a $5.9 million
grant from the Lilly
Endowment, a local philanthropic organization, they set out to transform the
prevailing vision of what preK-12 education is for -- as one district official
put it, "to meet the needs of the kids' future, and not the teachers' past."
They decided that they needed to teach a modern set of skills in a
student-centered way. Critical thinking, self-direction, and cultural
competency, along with fluency in technology, information resources, and visual
and graphic presentations. These were the elements of digital age literacy the
district believed its students would need in the twenty-first century. Educating
students for the new era demanded not only new content, they believed, but also
new teaching methods. Teachers needed to recast themselves as facilitators, and
to demand that students take more ownership of their learning.
Into Focus
Visit classrooms in Lawrence Township -- at least those where the change has
caught on -- and you'll see kids inventing their own projects, using computers in daily work, involving themselves in
community initiatives, and inquiring on their own about
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This article was also published in Edutopia
Magazine, June 2007
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