Maine news, sports, weather from Waterville Morning Sentinel

Education chief meets area students

By David F. Robinson drobinson@onlinesentinel.com
Staff Writer, Morning Sentinel

OAKLAND — Fourth-grader Makanatoa Aveau knows that there are deserts in Europe.

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Fifth-graders Quinn Hyland, left, C.J. Reid, Vincent Scott and Soujourn Bentley lead Department of Education Dommissioner Steven Bowen on a tour of Readfield Elementary School on Tuesday afternoon.

Staff photo by Joe Phelan

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Department of Education Commissioner Stepen Bowen and Williams School 4th graders give the thumbs up to a lesson powered by SMART board technology at the Oakland school on Tuesday. Bowen visited schools in the Kennebec Valley as part of his statewide listening tour.

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The 10-year-old read an old history book that told him otherwise, but he dug a little deeper and found a more recent study that proved deserts do exist on the continent, according to his teacher, Shelly Moody.

Aveau shared his discovery Tuesday morning while his class was taking a quiz with Maine's Education Commissioner Stephen Bowen, who sat in on the lesson at Williams Elementary School in Oakland.

Aveau helped write a European desert question for the quiz, which the students created themselves, and he proudly smiled when explaining the right answer to Bowen, who visited the class as one of the stops on his statewide tour of Maine schools.

After the quiz, Bowen said the students' enthusiasm showed promise for a new performance-based education model, which is being used in certain classes at a few select Maine schools, including Williams Elementary.

"So much of what they're doing here involves the student ownership and self-directed learning," he said, calling it a "cutting edge" class taught by Moody, who is the 2011 Maine Teacher of the Year.

The model allows students to advance through school at their own pace, instead of advancing all students at the same time, according to Bowen, and the goal is to replace traditional age-based grade systems.

Under the new model, students advance when they master new skills and it gives students who struggle more time to learn a lesson while letting others advance faster, he said.

While cuts in school aid are the first thing superintendents, parents and teachers bring up, performance-based education is always something that people want to know more about, Bowen said, referring to his listening tour.

Bowen has been holding public listening forums recently at school districts across Maine, while touring schools and meeting with superintendents and other adminstrators.

He met Tuesday morning with the Kennebec Valley Superintendents' Association, which has officials from school distiricts across Kennebec and Somerset counties, according to Linda Laughlin, assistant superintendent at Oakland-based Regional School Unit 18.

Laughlin said the group warned Bowen against requiring performance-based education for all of Maine's public schools.

They called it "a vision" that can be phased in over time, she said, commenting after Bowen's tour of Williams Elementary School, which has 235 students in grades three to five .

Bowen said more data is needed before making any decisions on performance-based education as a statewide model. His department has about two years of data and plans to track students' test results as they progress in the program, according to Bowen.

"The biggest hurdle is getting used to a new way of doing things — we're talking about doing away with 100 years of education traditions," Bowen said.

Moody told Bowen the program has done a great job getting her students engaged in class. Students get so involved in planning lessons that they some times ask to work through recess, she said.

"I have to tell them, 'go outside, get some sunshine, some vitamin D,'" Moody said.

During earlier stops on the tour, people have asked about future plans for Maine's policies on everything from school consolidations to curriculum, Bowen said.

The tour's goal is to help get input from across the state for a long-term plan for Maine's education system, according to Bowen. He said the performance-based education is something that he supports and hopes to expand in the near future.

"We need to come up with a strategic plan for education to think about what school's going to look like in 2020 and 2025," he said.