Community leaders picked up pens and paper and went to class last week as part of Brunswick County Schools’ Education Engagement Project.
The district invited community leaders to spend a day with a teacher in his or her classroom in order to better understand what education is like in 2014.
The project, which began last year, was initiated by Brunswick County Schools’ professional development coordinator Laura Hunter.
A couple years ago, Hunter read an article about a mayor in Maryland who spent a day in a classroom to learn more about schools in his city.
“That story inspired me,” she said. “Instead of expecting our leaders and community members to instinctively know what classrooms look like, sound like, feel like today, wouldn’t it be better if we invited them in to experience it? And, furthermore, could engagement of leaders and community members lead to deeper understanding and productive dialogue about our public schools?”
Hunter said the aim of the project is to address what educators call “the 15,000-hour problem.” The theory speaks to the fact that the majority of Americans attend public school beginning in kindergarten through 12th grade. This equates to about 15,000 hours in a classroom. She said people who spend that amount of time doing anything walk away with a certain “expert status.”
“So we have a whole public that is walking around in adulthood that think that they understand and know what the education experience looks like, feels like, should be,” she explained. “But their experience is based on a fixed place in time—their educational experience, which could have been a decade ago, or two decades ago or five decades ago.”
Through the Education Engagement Project, Hunter hopes to give the public a glimpse of today’s classroom environment. She, along with Brunswick County Schools director of quality assurance and community engagement Jessica Swencki, worked to get community leaders into the classrooms.
“So, our goal is to invite people in from the community who could very well be strong proponents and supporters of public education, but to help them to understand what a classroom looks like right now,” Hunter said. “Because the classroom of 2014 looks and feels very different from the classroom of their experience as a student. So our hope is that it gives people a better frame of reference for what we are talking about when we try to shape our dialogue out of the education community about issues related to public education, whether it be policy or otherwise.”
Hunter said the district plans to make the Education Engagement Project an annual event.
“Our goal is that it is continuous and it continues to invite the public into our schools to experience what school looks like right now,” she said. “We want them to be able to see public education through our lens, not through a nostalgic lens from their own education which could have been a long time ago and look very different.”
