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Williams Grant Recipients Show Off Fruits of Their Labor
By Rebecca Dravis, iBerkshires Staff
03:47PM / Wednesday, May 20, 2015
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Kate Caton from Mount Greylock shows a slideshow of pictures from a tri-district choral festival she organized using Olmsted Award grant money from Williams College.

Williams College President Adam Falk introduces the Olmsted Award recipients on Wednesday morning.

Karen Swann, longtime professor of English at Williams who is the college's associate dean for diversity, talked about the importance of public schools.


Perry Burdick from McCann Technical School shows off the robot that McCann students built in an after-school robotics program made possible by an Olmsted Award grant from Williams College.

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — What do robots, websites, books on bullying and youth choruses all have in common?

In North Berkshire, they were all projects able to be developed and presented to local public school students, thanks to Williams College's 2014 Bicentennial Olmsted Awards for Faculty Development.

At a Wednesday morning breakfast in the college's Faculty House, President Adam Falk announced the winners of the 2015 grants to Adams-Cheshire Regional School District, Berkshire Arts and Technology Public Charter School, Lanesborough Elementary School, McCann Technical School, North Adams Public Schools, Mount Greylock Regional School and Williamstown Elementary School. But then he turned the program over so the 2014 winners could demonstrate what they had done with the $5,000 they received for professional and curricular development projects.  

"It's a terrific variety of projects," Falk said.

Indeed, Perry Burdick and Erin Mucci of McCann's Information Technology Program wowed the crowd with a demonstration of the robot an after-school group created last year to complete in regional challenges. While Burdick showed off the robot itself, Mucci projected a video of the students at the competition, which had the theme "The Cascade Effect" and challenged the students to create a robot that could pick up and set down wiffle balls. Not only did they have to build a working robot to certain specifications, they had to be able to troubleshoot at the event, including when the robot tipped over or did not perform correctly.

Mucci said the students did a wonderful job thinking on their feet.

"They were so proud of themselves. It was a wonderful moment," she said, adding how much excitement the robotics program has generated among the students at McCann. "They're at my door at the end of the day saying, 'Do we have robotics today?'"

From robots to websites, two Williamstown-based educators talked about how the grants enabled them to improve external communication sites. Mount Greylock has been able to dedicate a part of its website to the middle school, allowing better communication for seventh- and eighth-grade students and their families. And Williamstown Elementary School has been able to retool its own website after losing its host last year.

Also at Williamstown Elementary School, Principal Joelle Brookner said the grant helped with some behind-the-scenes work, including training the school's kindergarten teachers on the Massachusetts Kindergarten Entry Assessment (MKEA) system, which supports school districts in using a formative assessment tool that measures growth and learning across all developmental domains during the child's kindergarten year. In addition, the school was able to fund kindergarten through third-grade teachers in finding ways to tweak the math curriculum to align with Common Core standards.

Brookner said she was impressed that the teachers did the training on their own time, indicating their commitment to making the transition work.

"All but one teacher ... took the class," she said. "I was blown away."

Back down at Mount Greylock, grants also enabled choir director Kate Caton to organize a tri-district choral festival for elementary- and middle-school choral and music students in the region. Caton showed a photo montage of the choral students accompanied by a soundtrack from the festival. And ninth-grade English teacher Rebecca Tucker-Smith used the money to buy copies of the book "Positive" by local author Ali Benjamin, which focuses on a girl born HIV positive who was continuously bullied and how she overcame those challenges. Benjamin also was able to visit the classroom for what was dubbed the "people behaving badly" unit of the curriculum, Tucker-Smith said, adding that the students really responded to the critical thinking aspect with surprising candor, especially in their writing.

"The journal reflections ... were raw, heartfelt and honest," she said.

This year's winners promise to be as exciting as last year's, Falk said. Adams-Cheshire will use its Olmsted Award to improve instruction for English Language Learners (ELL). BArT's Olmsted award will support three projects: the digitization of student portfolios, adaptation of the school's science curriculum to the new Next Generation Science Standards and the creation of new teacher support groups, run by a trained facilitator. For Lanesborough Elementary and Williamstown Elementary, the award will allow three to five teachers from each school, along with the principals, technology coordinators, and other administrators, to attend the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) national conference in Philadelphia in June.

McCann hopes to expand the robotics club to be year-round and also offer a robotics summer camp. Mount Greylock will use the Olmsted funds to reinstate its ninth-grade team model, to provide support for the academic, social, and emotional  growth for those students, which will include a hike of Mount Greylock and participation in Ramblewild's tree-to-tree aerial course and low-ropes course. And North Adams Public Schools will use the grant to fund a program called  "The Leader in Me" at Brayton Elementary School, which aims to increase student skills and self-confidence, improve academics, and decrease discipline referrals, as well as to fund curriculum development training for the district's secondary teachers, in particular those who teach Advanced Placement courses in science, math, English, and social studies.

In introducing the awards, Falk talked about the dedication Williams College has to supporting public education, as he knows the students who end up at Williams come with so much knowledge and so many skills thanks to their previous teachers.

"We never pretend the students we educate come from nowhere and we invent them," he said.

In that symbiotic relationship, the local schools give so much back to the college by allowing Williams students to do internships and other projects with them.

"They learn not just general things," Falk said. "What they learn is what it takes on the ground to be an effective educator. Teaching by example is the best way to learn."

In closing Wednesday's presentation, Karen Swann, longtime professor of English at Williams who is the college's associate dean for diversity, echoed Falk's sentiments on the importance of public schools.

"I descend from an exalted lineage of people who really valued their public school education," she said, listing off all of her family members who have taught in a public school, including her parents. "I was always really proud to be a teacher's kid."

That pride in public schools continued as she watched her daughter Anna progress through Williamstown Elementary School and Mount Greylock. She recalled how she used her experiences chaperoning Anna's field trips and seeing her teachers in action to help her when she was struggling with a difficult classroom of her own, witnessing what she referred to as the "magical alchemy" of a classroom.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Anna has graduated from college and is looking for a job in New York City schools.

"She totally acknowledges now that she was propelled into teaching by those teachers," Swann said.

Swann closed by acknowledging that she knows being a public school educator is difficult, especially in these times of more mandates and fewer resources. But she said it's amazing to her what comes out of the classroom despite these challenges, like all of the examples shown at the breakfast by last year's grant recipients.

"Imaginative human beings can provide a space in that environment," she said. "You can't mandate a mechanical robot. Teaching and learning always has the capacity to surprise."

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