Windows & Mirrors: Reflecting on Community (Cabot Community School)
For anyone who lives, works, or plays in the NEK Cabot’s reputation as a close-knit community is well known. Like many rural communities in our region, Cabot is a community of people that care about and for each other. It is a community where adults model civic engagement – at town meeting, in its structures of government, through volunteerism, and within the business community: the hardware store is also a popular gathering place where in addition to picking up your Saturday project materials you can also catch some great local music, grab some locally sourced food and a local brew to go with it. Here is another relevant fun fact, according to a reliable source, Cabot has more non-profits per capita than any other rural community in New England. Even if the last is hyperbole, the common thread running throughout is the shared value of community and the sense of belonging that it engenders. There is a coherence in these interconnected community relationships that offers the school an invaluable and solid foundation.
Perhaps that is why it is no surprise that the Cabot Community School utilizes a Project Based Learning (PBL) framework. We caught up with Rebecca Tatistcheff, school principal earlier this summer, just after the floods had ripped through Cabot’s downtown and close to the school. When asked how the community was doing, Rebecca responded that they were all digging out and pitching in. Although the school was not impacted directly by the flooding the indirect impacts are tangible: there is a lot of loss – families in the school have all been touched by the trauma of the flood. Relevant to this, Rebecca shared, the role of the Cabot Community School is to “help young people to develop their sense of empowerment. To see themselves as change makers and as a resource within their community.” Perhaps this school year will offer greater opportunity for students to be a resource within their community, and it may be a bit different, and yet, some things will remain a constant – such as the way Cabot does school.
It is through Project Based Learning (PBL) that students and staff uncover learning at the Cabot Community School. In PBL students begin to perceive that they are the creators of their narrative, and the navigator of their unique learning path. “A lot of what that that looks can be very challenging for the kids,” observed Rebecca, “There is a lot of grey area, a lot of unknown unknowns for both students and staff.” Each unique pathway is reflective of the uniqueness of the student, and the approach to learning – what Rebecca calls, “Windows and Mirrors.” It is through windows students can see new vistas, and through reflection that students explore the meaning of the new vistas, and the relevance to their own life. “This can be extended to all areas of study. Students might be looking through the window of natural resources and reflecting on how that impacts human ecology.” Rebecca says, “It could be geology and sustainability, or community and social & emotional learning.” It is through the exploration of the mirrors and windows (refractions?) that the pathways of learning become evident.
Of the challenges Rebecca and the staff at the Cabot Community School face in implementing PBL none are quite as daunting as figuring out the how: How do you support individual students unique learning and still meet the core curriculum? How do you support developmental differences and learning differences in a small school that requires inter-grade classrooms? How do you support arts in a community that does not have an art teacher? And – for one of the few remaining Pre-K -to 12 schools in the state – How do you do that with consistency? Answering these questions is daunting – and is also a place that VREC is uniquely positioned to step in and offer students and staff opportunities that remove barriers to learning by providing resources for student-led projects.
The VREC mini-grant program is just one of many tools in the toolbox. Some of Cabot student’s PBL work is supported by community efforts – volunteerism, donation, mentoring; the examples abound: For instance, when faced with not having a budget for playground equipment the 3/4th grade students said, “That’s not the kind of school we are!” Rebecca shared. They incorporated fundraising for playground equipment into their study and learning, they wrote letters of appeal for support. In addition to 3 & 4th grade students pulling together numerous funding resources the students worked with the architects from Natural Playgrounds to create the space that they wanted and envisioned for themselves and future students. Another example is that of the 4/5th grade students’ study of the Revolutionary War. The VREC mini-grant made it possible to extend that learning opportunity to include families of students in a trip to Boston.
At Cabot Community School it is the PBL model that bridges the need and the work of learning. By expanding opportunity and allowing students to be situated to experience a broader life-scope – to find themselves, and to find themselves with the context of their community – students develop a first-person narrative that helps them define who they are, shape their sense of autonomy, and become agents of change. “It is through responding creatively to challenges that students learn that they are agents of change,” says Rebecca. To learn more about the Cabot Community School, please visit: https://www.cabotschool.org, or check out their social media: https://www.facebook.com/cabotschool/
