Renovating a Library for 21st Century Learning

PlusUs worked with Perkiomen Valley Middle School East to re-design their 4,000 square foot library space for 21st century learning. We created a variety of flexible and cost-effective solutions that promote group dialogue, presentations, random interactions, individual work, hands-on work, and whole body learning.

Distributing Making Around Campus

PlusUs collaborated with Friends’ Central School (FCS) to expand opportunities for project-based learning around campus. As the values of a maker education became increasingly integral to FCS, and as use of the school’s makerspace increased, FCS foresaw the need to offer supplementary space for making.

To do this, we worked with students and teachers to transform underutilized spaces around campus into miniature makerspaces called MakerNooks. These small spaces provide tools, materials, and workspace to small groups and individuals. In distributing these MakerNooks around campus, students and teachers can more easily incorporate making into their work.

From Making the Grade to Making

This excerpt is from a reflection written by Gary Heidt, Director of Learning at PlusUs. The entire piece can be found on our blog.

I work in an area of Pennsylvania with many “good” public schools.  I say “good” because there are a number of high schools in this area that sit at the top of the rankings for “Most Challenging Schools” or “Best High Schools” done by any number of publications in the state/nation. Naturally, these lists all have their own metrics for selection; however when one digs deep enough, the metrics usually resolve themselves into some reliance on test scores, most notably the number of students in a district taking and passing AP tests.

I know little about AP classes other than they cause my own students a good deal of (good?) stress, that they seem successful in stuffing students full of information, and that many students enjoy the challenge in the game of regurgitation and getting the “5” on the test. After all, that’s what school is about.  And it certainly helps that such success may well excuse successful students from the “intro” courses at college.  Let us face it, on the level that matters most, economics, taking an AP course and passing out of a college requirement is money well spent.

(Full disclosure:  I probably would have been a 4—AP class-a-year student if they had been around when I was in high school.  I was good at the game of school.)

GOOD SCHOOLS

Thus, when a district shows up on the “awards list du jour,” when the awarding educational conglomerate or state official sends the congratulatory banner emblazoned with their brand/seal, when the schools celebrate their academic acumen at faculty and board meetings, well, this is, I suppose, what it means to be a “good school.”  I also imagine parents who succeeded in schools just like these, and how they would want to live in districts with “good schools,” and so I understand the cachet that accompanies the hard work it took from teachers and students alike to play that game, to “score” that goal and win that trophy, that banner, that emblem. (I recognize that I have ignored the elephant in the room, namely the issue of how socio-economic status is clearly linked with student success and achievement in schooling.  However, an examination of that pachyderm will have to wait.)

MAKING THE GRADE

Of course, placing such important rankings upon these classes really begs the question that AP achievement (or almost any test for that matter) actually is a proper standard for what constitutes a “good school.”

Is it?  Well, the answer rests upon the assumption that the way we have always done school works best...

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