Seeing through the fog

District 204 wanted to address the qualitative aspects that lead to the success outside the classroom. Without a practice to life competencies, there are no global citizens. Thus, there is a connection between academic skill and civic education. That connection is Indian Prairie’s “Portrait of a Graduate.”

Portrait of a Graduate is a recent implementation from this school year. Its goal is to state the characteristics students should have distinctly after high school. The school district has built a team with community leaders, students, educators, and parents. The big team was determined to create the six competencies in Portrait of a Graduate. 

“This is the right time to go with this. Over the last few years, we were thinking about what it means to be college-ready? What does it mean to be career-ready? What does it mean to be life-ready,” Indian Prairie’s Director of Core Curriculum Michael Purcell said. “We did not have good indicators in place that I could say with some certainty or even a student could say that they can say that they are life-ready.”

Overall, Portrait of a Graduate embodies the qualitative aspects versus quantitative values students should have. It is another attempt to clarify the purpose of education. 

“Two of [the competencies] relate to the habits of mind. Two of them relate to the habits of will and two overlays to the habits of heart,” Purcell said.

 Now, how can teachers give teach that in their classroom? How are teachers maintaining the balance between the curricular and instructional values? A lot of it comes down to the classroom structure. No matter how strong the curriculum is, the responsibility to cultivate comfortable learning environments falls on the teacher.

For a long time, classrooms were in rows. The room must be quiet, and the place is meant for solitary learning. With those obsolete components, finding the epiphany to education is nearly impossible.

Flexible seating is not the only recent shift in classroom structure. Teachers are looking at new approaches to reach their student’s intellectual curiosity but also catching those who may be struggling in the classroom. 

“[Check-ins] provide [students] a space for feedback between the student and me, but also between their peers. I’ll clip their words and put them on the SMART Board. If [students] thought they were alone, here’s eight out of 25 of them all feeling the same thing,” Hayes said.

Teachers who create a positive learning environment can break the glass of passive learning. Furthermore, they can begin to open up the relevancy of their classrooms. And students are likely to challenge themselves. 

“Flexibility has a lot of positive effects. I think that it kind of goes away from the ‘you get it or don’t kind of mindset’,” senior Heidi Gabriel said. “Our STEM departments at school structure their classrooms differently compared to how it was back then. I think that it opens up more students who didn’t think they would be able to take a specific class.”

In addition, prompting challenging questions pushes students to think outside of the textbook. Although there are baseline targets, the classroom structure needs to incorporate a student’s choice of learning. 

“The College Board has certain things [teachers] have to do. But I think providing students with choice is the number one thing we can do to help students become critical thinkers, problem solvers, and communicators,” English teacher Megan Cherne said. “Not only are [students] demonstrating that they know the skills, but they are also figuring out how you learn best and what you need to do to be successful.”

Teaching is like tending a garden. Beautiful gardens are not the result of entrepreneurial innovation or industrial manufacture. It takes patience, attention, gratuity, and love for the diversity among every individual. The reward is a million different seeds come to reward society with full beauty. 

A version of this story originally appeared in Issue 3 of The Stampede.