Barrington Rhode Island is not your ordinary town. Located less than a dozen miles from Providence, Barrington has been named one of the best places to live in the U.S. as a result of several factors including housing costs and student success rates. Barrington schools are also home to some of the most forward-thinking educators in our country. Several years back Northeastern’s NExT initiative inspired the Barrington district to make the leap towards experiential learning and the results have been staggering. Middle school robotics teacher Rebecca Henderson and digital literacy teacher Mark Davis are two of the innovative educators who readily embraced this challenge. Their efforts demonstrate the power of teacher collaborations to create interdisciplinary instruction that is multimodal in nature and includes the important aspects of self-, peer- and teacher reflection.
As part of a deeper learning initiative at Barrington Schools, Henderson and Davis had been given time to plan together and think about how teaching the whole child includes both deep content knowledge and social and emotional skills that are enhanced through opportunities to use the 4 C’s of collaboration, communication, critical thinking, and creativity in the classroom. As they discussed how these skills were being taught in their classrooms they were curious to see if their students could take a difficult task they learned in class and teach it to peers in the other teacher’s class. Henderson and Davis understood that often the most difficult part of learning is understanding something well enough to teach it to others, and that is where their journey began.
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Portnoy, L. (2018, November). Developing the whole child, one collaboration at a time. Getting Smart. Retrieved from https://www.gettingsmart.com/2018/11/developing-the-whole-child-one-collaboration-at-a-time/