First graders are years away from finishing high school and choosing careers. But as a group of 1st grade teachers in a Kentucky district work with their young students on reading, writing, and math, they’re also imparting a different set of skills that colleges and employers might someday demand.
It’s part of a push in the Bullitt County district, south of Louisville, to emphasize universal skills that correspond with what will be expected of students as they enter college, the workforce, or military service, on top of academic content.
High schools across the country are slowly retooling to offer their students greater exposure to potential careers and job-specific training. Students, by and large, say they want this assistance. But preparing students to be successful in college and careers starts well before high school—and it doesn’t only involve occupation-specific training. Rather, employers in survey after survey say they look for hires with a set of skills that are applicable in any job—often, the abilities to collaborate, solve problems, and communicate effectively.
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Those are the kinds of skills Bullitt County is focused on teaching through learning experiences that tend to include hands-on projects, driven largely by students, that directly respond to community needs. In addition to addressing required academic standards, each experience also emphasizes at least one of the six universal skills the district has prioritized.
The Bullitt County district started down this path years ago, holding focus groups and community meetings with students, educators, parents, local employers, and other community members, to collect their ideas on the skills and characteristics students should have once they graduate from any of the 13,000-student district’s three high schools.
The result was Bullitt County’s graduate profile, which shows in graphical form that the district wants its graduates to be effective communicators, innovative problem-solvers, productive collaborators, self-directed navigators, community contributors, and mastery learners.
Educators in the district have since worked on breaking down each characteristic, or competency, to define what it means for students to embody it, and how it looks at different grade levels. Teachers of even the district’s youngest students can incorporate those competencies into projects.
“We have teachers that are willing to embrace that idea and think, ‘OK, you’re not graduating, but what would that look like to a 1st grader?’” said Ashley Byerley, an instructional coach in the district.
Over time, students’ understanding of the competencies will evolve and deepen, she said. “But it’s not going to deepen if we don’t provide the foundations.”
Students become effective communicators and community contributors
Last January, the four 1st grade teachers at Old Mill Elementary School approached a handful of reading and writing standards through a project involving cats, dogs, and horses that were up for adoption at the nearby Kentucky Humane Society.
They kicked it off by looking up photos from the annual World’s Ugliest Dog contest, said Trisha Smith, one of the 1st grade teachers. The teachers challenged their students to come up with nice things to say about each animal, as if it were up for adoption and looking for a home.
Then, students learned about the shelter’s operations through a video from shelter staff and got to work, said teacher Jenna Bray. They browsed the shelter’s website to familiarize themselves with the dogs, cats, and horses up for adoption. Students chose their favorite animal and crafted short plugs explaining why the pet should be adopted. They recorded what they’d written, incorporated the audio into an animated class presentation, and shared their work with the shelter.
While the project was an applied way to tackle opinion-writing skills and reading standards, the teachers also discussed two related competencies from the district’s graduate profile throughout the experience: “community contributor” and “effective communicator.”
They often talked about the competencies while debriefing at the end of a day working on their project, asking students to reflect on how they had been effective communicators and community contributors, Smith said. For a 1st grader, being an effective communicator could involve speaking at a respectful volume or using the right body language, she said.
When the teachers began working the competencies into their instruction, Smith said, she was skeptical.
“I was one of the ones that was like, ‘Oh my gosh, these grad profile competencies. My kids are not going to understand these,’” she said. “I’ve been surprised by how well they do understand and can apply the grad profile competencies.”
This school year will involve additional projects to develop the competencies.
First graders this fall have worked on producing a puppet show for a story of their choosing to perform at a storytelling café for invited guests. The project addresses the “productive collaborator” competency, as students will work in groups to produce their shows.
In the spring, the children will learn about animals and local wildlife habitat conservation with the help of the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife, and create videos, dioramas, or infographics. That undertaking will focus on being community contributors and self-directed navigators.
And the teachers expect to do the Kentucky Humane Society project again.
“Doing these experiences helps us build a better relationship with our kids, because they’re truly having fun while learning,” Bray said. “It’s a whole different atmosphere in a way.”
Project-based learning is an adjustment
It’s been an adjustment for the teachers to teach content and standards through projects, rather than using direct instruction for the bulk of a unit and concluding it with a project, Smith said. The authentic learning experiences take time to coordinate—and original thinking. The district has received some outside help from organizations including PBL Works and Next Generation Learning Challenges, and has been training teachers on designing the learning experiences in yearlong cohorts.
“We learned in such a traditional environment, and to stop what we know and what we learned ourselves to embrace these new pedagogical ideas of building students to become these workforce-ready students, it’s just a different mindset,” said Byerley, the instructional coach. “Content’s important, but the competencies focus on not just the content, but how to use what you know in a real-world setting.”
Helping 1st graders build up workforce competencies through project-based learning doesn’t only have a long-term payoff. The projects also make learning fun, Smith said.
“If they’re having fun, I’m having fun, too,” she said. “I love what I do, and I know that a lot of teachers don’t really say that anymore. But I think this has a big part to play in that because our kids are more engaged. It’s just a better learning environment.”
