Gravette High School juniors recently completed a collaborative project in their English class where they came up with a proposal to answer the following question: Is there something within the community of Gravette or our school(s) that could be added or modified to help our students and/or our town?
Students spent time brainstorming and narrowing down topics and then joined groups to develop a claim, conduct research to support their reasoning, and interview an adult connected to their chosen topic in order to understand possible obstacles or valid objections to their claim. They then organized everything into an effective visual aid and presented their proposal.
Moreover, Gravette Schools are in the process of implementing Leader in Me, which is based on the book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Mrs. Bassing and Mrs. Morgan saw the value of encouraging these leadership qualities by designing a real-world project that also meets the state ELA standards (English Language Arts) of argumentative writing, collaboration, and speaking-listening skills. Students had to communicate effectively, hold one another accountable to their assigned tasks, seek to understand the other side’s point of view (often tweaking their own claim/reasoning as a result), think win-win to develop a solution, and then professionally present their proposals.
Even though this was the first year for the project, Mrs. Bassing and Mrs. Morgan were very pleased with the level of engagement, effort, and professionalism exhibited by our Gravette students. They proposed everything from adding new sports to modifying the current exemption policy to advocating for the building of an indoor athletic facility to moving to a 4-day school week! While not all ideas are feasible right now for Gravette, just working through the process of the proposal project taught students valuable lessons and life skills as well as how to effectively use their own voice when engaging with their community.
We also want to extend a special thank you to Mr. Gravette, Mrs. Mitchell, Coach Bearden, Coach Vire, Mrs. Hawkins, Mrs. Smithers, Officer Savage, Mr. Galloway, Mrs. Moots, and Monica Castellano for their willingness to be interviewed and thoughtfully respond to students’ questions. You often gave them a lot to think about, and the project would not have been as successful without you!
We look forward to continuing to make the experience of this project even stronger and more effective in the future.
