Community Building at Prairie Creek

[Trina Eichel]

My first impression upon arriving at Prairie Creek Community School was “Wow, this looks nothing like my elementary school”. The tiny school building is surrounded by a huge grassy field, corn crop, and woods. This was very different from my 500 student public elementary school that had a huge asphalt playground surrounded by portable classrooms. We met Molly outside in front of the school where she was taking her lunch break on the steps. Even this seemingly small detail jumped out as different to me because it doesn’t fit into the profile I have for elementary teachers who always eat in the faculty room.

As soon as lunch was over, we headed over to the classroom to meet the students. Immediately, students started coming up to Kara and me and introducing themselves as well as asking us questions about who we are and our academic interests. We all gathered outside in the courtyard beside the classroom (each class at Prairie Creek has its own outside space to hold class) and sat in a circle. Kara and I introduced ourselves and told the students why we were there. The students immediately started making connections with us and telling us what we have in common. After we went, the students introduced themselves to us by telling us their name and their favorite school subject. The students seemed very excited to tell us all about themselves and it was clear that their opinions were valued in their day-to-day at school.

After our brief introduction, we all headed out to the grass for the all-school meeting. It was shocking to see the entire school all gathered together because there were so few of them. I couldn’t grasp that this was all of them (180 students in total). Molly explained to Kara and me that the point of the meeting was to build community as a school since the entire previous year they were limited to interacting with only their class. The teachers at prairie creek were determined to mitigate “pandemic hangover” by reestablishing a strong community by encouraging interaction between classrooms and class-years. We started the meeting by singing a song together and then playing a 4-corners game. This game asked the students to stand next to the teacher holding up the activity they most like to do. Molly explained that they were moving into full-school recess on Friday and wanted to get students of different grade levels used to collaborating and playing safely together. Prairie Creek structures their school around community building and allowing students to learn from each other. We got to see this philosophy in action throughout the day.

According to Piaget, the Egrets (Molly’s 2nd and 3rd graders) should be in the concrete operational stage of development. The 3rd graders modeled some key aspects of assimilation and accommodation during their wild Wednesday activity. This activity was designed to strengthen their observational vocabulary. Students were told to turn around while Molly hid a yellow pencil in the woods that they were then asked to locate with their eyes, but not point to or shout out when they saw it. In the first round, Molly hid the pencil on the ground near a tree trunk and it did not take students long to locate it. In the second round, Molly hid the pencil in a branch, above the children’s eye-line. I noticed that the students had a much harder time locating this one because they were looking in places that were similar to the previous location. They did not have the schema to allow them to imagine a pencil hidden in a higher place. After Molly gave the student’s a clue, they eventually located the pencil. For the third round, Molly hid the pencil behind her ear so that if the children simply looked in her direction they would see it. However, many children talked to Molly and still did not notice the pencil. It was unfathomable for most of the students that the answer would be so obvious. It took them a long time to solve this one. It was very interesting to see concrete operational students doing this task because they did it according to the rules that they felt were in place (after that first round) – the pencil will be hidden on the ground of the woods. They could not think outside of their previously developed schema for the hidden pencil in order to locate it in more obvious, but “outside of the box” places.

One observation that I feel challenges Piaget’s stages happened in the fourth round of the pencil hiding activity. In this round, Molly hid a long black pencil and a short white pencil. The students began making predictions (unprompted) about which would be easier or harder to find in the woods. I felt that the whole concept of being able to make a hypothesis about something that is not physically in front of them (abstract) is something only formal operational children are capable of. This made me think that perhaps Piaget’s stages are not as cut and dry as he describes them and that some developmental stages may bleed into others, especially with the addition of peer input and perspective.

I loved my first day at Prairie Creek. It is clear that the school is child-focused and community driven which provides such an interesting perspective of the theories we are learning in this class. I am excited to compare my observations at Prairie Creek to those of peers working in the Northfield Public schools and think that these will produce some very interesting contrasts.

[Molly Schwartz]

Prairie Creek sounds like such a fun school! I can totally relate to your reaction about how your school felt nothing like the one you went to. It’s really interesting how personal our school experiences are and how we continue to carry them with us wherever we go. The pencil scavenger hunt activity is such a great example of students building observational skills and how the stage of concrete operational is actualized. I also appreciated your discussion of how the students were able to think abstractly and would therefore would be classified as formal operational. I would be curious to understand the distinction between imagination in pre-operational and abstract and hypothetical thinking in formal operational.

[Kara Sun]

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