The class that I am observing is a second and third grade mixed class at Prairie Creek Community School, taught by Molly McGovern. Prairie Creek is a public charter school. This means that there is no tuition, and students get admitted by lottery because the school is capped at 180 kids. They mix all the grades: kindergarten is mixed with first grade, second with third, and forth with fifth. This design is meant to both build community and lean into the idea of children teaching each other.

I get to observe on Wild Wednesdays, where they spend the majority of the day learning outside. This does not only mean that they take their normal material and learn it sitting in a circle outside, but rather the teachers actually build a curriculum of outdoor learning for that day. For example, Molly was playing a game with her students where they had to find the pencil that she had placed in an area of the woods. While at first it seemed like a simple game, I quickly realized that the students were practicing many skills at once. The most obvious one was the skill of searching for the pencil – they had to use their eyes to find it, and also might pay attention to others and where they seemed to get excited because maybe that’s where the pencil was. First Molly hid it on the ground, and they found it fairly quickly. But the second time she hid it in plain sight on a branch, and it took a while to find because no one was looking up (they needed to learn that searching for the pencil didn’t only mean looking on the ground – they needed to change their schema of where pencils are hidden!). Another skill that the kids were working on was silently leaving the area and standing by the “shed” once they’d found the pencil, so that they didn’t give it away for the other kids. This seemed to me to be a form of community-building and teaching students to think about others’ needs even in the midst of their own excitement at finding the pencil. The students did not make the game into a competition or race, instead enjoying the individual challenge and learning to appreciate their own success without turning others into failures. Lastly, students were practicing their integrity as they were asked to turn the other direction while Molly was hiding the pencil. It would have been easy to peek because Molly was not constantly watching to make sure they weren’t looking, but I did not notice a single student look when they weren’t supposed to.

I really enjoyed noticing how students helped one another throughout my visit. The mixing of grades appeared to be integral to the school culture and principles. There are the mixed grades, but then they also have “bird buddies” (each class has a bird name – I’m with the Egrets), where there is a student from each of the three age groupings which makes a buddy trio. Furthermore, every Wednesday right when Trina and I arrive after lunch, they have an all-school gathering. In the gathering this week they played a game with all the students, and I watched older students repeatedly reach out to younger students to get them involved and make sure they understood the game. I was very impressed by the number of soft skills these students are directly practicing in their schooling. Furthermore, Molly talked about how this cross-age community allowed students to thrive in different ways and develop different skills. She talked about how one fourth grade boy often had conflict with students in his own grade, but was wonderful with younger students

I was very impressed by how in-tune Molly was with her students. She has been teaching at Prairie Creek for 16 years, and has really learned to tune into her students’ body language and needs. She knew how each of them was feeling at different times, and understood that each student needed a different type of check-in or encouragement. She noticed was constantly making decisions about how to act or react to different students. She also talked about the joys and challenges of having her own kids at the school (one fourth grade boy and one second grade girl), and how at school she had to walk the fine line of being both a mom and a teacher (though she has never taught her own kids).

The main aspects of “pandemic hangover” that I noticed at school were the positive changes that have recently developed. Students were very joyful when playing with each other and getting to physically touch, even though they had to wear masks when they weren’t eating or drinking. It reminded me of how difficult and unnatural it was for me to enforce a 6-foot distance rule between kids when I was working at an outdoor summer camp in 2020, the first summer of the pandemic. It was great to see kids get to have an almost-normal school experience, although I am sure it still affects them to not be able to see much of each other’s faces.

The Piaget stage theory of cognitive development suggests that the class that I was working with should have students that are just transitioning from preoperational to concrete operational. One thing I noticed that coincides with the preoperational stage was a love of make-believe. The first interaction I had with a student was a girl introducing me to her leaf people. However, students also demonstrated the concrete operational stage with their problem-solving skills during the pencil finding game. Students were updating their schemas and thinking logically about where they pencil might be hidden, as well as what might make it easier or more difficult to find.

I really enjoyed my first visit at Prairie Creek and am excited to go back! I learned a ton from Molly already and am looking forward to continuing to observe her teaching style and ask her questions. I appreciated that she also brought up cultural differences may affect student experiences. For example, I was asking her if she thought it made a difference that students call the teachers by their first names instead of their last. She said not really, except that it puts them all on equal footing with getting to call each other by first names. However, she also brought up the question of if calling teachers by their first names is more accepted in some cultures than others, and thus could be more accessible to some students and parents than others.