An editorial article authored by Matthew Tully, and published in the March 12, 2015 edition of the Indianapolis Star, featured a remiscence by Mr. Tully upon his high school days at Portage High School, and an exceptionally impactful lesson delivered by his speech teacher, Mr. Bodner. The point of Tully’s trip down memory lane was to extol the value of teacher creativity in the classroom; the importance of teachers being given some freedoms in executing their lesson plans, allowing them to do more than “teach the test (ISTEP, in today’s parlance).”

Reading the article prompted me to finally commit to paper – or electronic space, as it were – a recent learning experience in which my son recently participated. Jack is a 5^th grade high ability student at Avon Intermediate West, where his teachers are Ms. Christy Shepard (homeroom, language arts, and social studies), and Ms. Kathryn Dunphy (math and science). We’ve been so fortunate for Jack to end up with two teachers whose respective approaches to education are rigorous, challenging, and display tremendous amounts of creativity – per Tully’s exhortation. This particular experience was taken up in Ms. Shepard’s social studies curriculum, where Jack and his classmates were assigned one of the original 13 American colonies and required to do a fair amount of work to learn as much as they could about the colonies’ trade specializations, climates, and available natural resources.

The project had several components – the students were to individually memorize key facts on the topic areas concerning their respective colonies, and these facts were critiqued through weekly oral quizzes that Ms. Shepard conducted with each student. Then, the students were teamed up with others focused on the same colonies with the stated goal of devising a presentation and recitation of the characteristics to the students’ parents. The key to the presentation: convince the parents to move to their assigned colonies by persuading them with the most enticing aspects of life in those colonies.

The culmination of the lesson was an evening event at which the students would display their posterboards showcasing details about their colonies, along with some foodstuffs to heighten the enticement of their colonies’ offerings. Then, the students would stand at their stations with these items on display, and play the part of travel agent – talking up their colonies in a way that would make their migratory audiences compelled to locate to the agents’ assigned regions. Further criteria for success were based upon the quality of the agents’ delivery of their colonies’ facts: their use of key transitional statements, and the details presented in their recitations. Finally, at the end of the evening , the parents and family members would vote on which colony’s representative was the most convincing.

The myriad layers of learning imbued in this experience were both exciting and, at times, subtle. The skills being developed were all key to Ms. Shepard’s students’ future success, and yet it was all ensconced in a fun, creative approach to teaching her learners how to develop those skills. We thoroughly enjoyed working with Jack throughout the project, and seeing the display of all the kids’ hard work. A big thumbs up to Ms. Shepard for engaging her class!