• Unlocking Secrets to Great Learning

     
Scialdone Teaching

  • March 31, 2017

    “Escape Room” has been all the rage for a while now. You’ve heard about it. 

    You play the “game” by paying an entrance fee to get locked in a room. Then you work together with your friends to find clues that will get you out.

    Sound fun? Matt Scialdone and his English teacher colleagues at Middle Creek High School thought so.

    So did the 4C Grant Fund. The Fund supports engaged learning that comprises Collaboration, Creativity, Critical Thinking and Communication. 

    OK, so no one got locked in a room

    Matt and his colleagues designed an activity where students have to unlock boxes instead, using clues based on literature they have read this year in class.

    “That takes communication, you gotta talk to people,” Scialdone told the class. “I don’t care what job you go and get – your boss will want you to have these skills.”

    The team that wins unlocks the box for yet more clues that eventually lead to the name of a country where one of the stories the students read this year is set.

     

    English I is mostly for high school freshmen, and it focuses on all major genres of literature: plays, poems, essays, short stories and novels.

    Their most recent unit of study involved comparing non-fiction with dystopian literature. So, clues for unlocking the boxes were drawn from works such as “All Summer in a Day,” by Ray Bradbury, and “Harrison Bergeron,” by Kurt Vonnegut.

    Three Students Working on Project

    'Welcome to the rest of your life'

    Students numbered off into groups, shared kits and worked together to find clues. Definitely a 4Cs kind of deal.

    “Welcome to the rest of your life,” Scialdone told the students of the type of work they were doing. “You’re never going to be upset at doing more.”

    Freshman Nevaeh Calloway said she enjoyed the experience and saw the value of its application to the real world.

    “I learned that cooperation is very important, and I’d like to do it again sometime,” she said.

     
The 4C Grant Fund contributed $125,000 to support about 20 classroom projects that demonstrated the 4 Cs during the 2016-17 school year. In addition to creative projects like this one at Middle Creek, projects funded across the district included "desk bikes" at Martin Magnet Middle School. Students were allowed to pedal while they worked, which led to increased performance and fewer behavioral problems. 
 
Over at Douglas Magnet Elementary, the Fund supported the purchase of oversized musical instruments installed on the school's playground. And at Weatherstone Elementary, a reading and writing improvement program using super-hero themed LEGOs was supported by the Fund.
 
Another round of grants for the 2017-18 school year will be announced later this spring.