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Speaker Marshall Baker told a group of Snyder ISD teachers about his experience at Kolb’s Learning Institute. Amongst the attending teachers are, in the front (l-r), Taylor Snodgrass, Xavier Gutierrez, Jana Deloach, and Michael Young.
While the wait on Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath’s approval continues, Snyder ISD officials are moving ahead with preparations for the proposed dual pathway curriculum that may go into effect next year.
On Tuesday Snyder ISD teachers had their first day of training for each of the pathways.
Two experts talked about their experiences with the pathways — one to talk about the pathway based on Marzano’s model of high-reliability schools and one to discuss the pathway based on Kolb’s experiential learning theory.
Dr. Rachel McClain, Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum at Snyder ISD, said administrators wanted the district’s teachers to hear the philosophies behind the two options and to see what the theories would look like in practice rather than only in theory. Administrators can then begin speaking to teachers about their preferred environment for the 2020-21 school year.
“That’s really what the intent is,” McClain said. “To give our teachers some foundational knowledge of what it might look like and just expose them to the framework and the educational theory behind what we’ve been talking about.”
While there are many similarities between the two pathways, McClain said that the main distinction is that Pathway 2 is much more immersed in concrete application from the very beginning of the learning process than Pathway 1, which can be much more abstract and less focused on real-world application. This pathway is a bit more similar to the traditional classroom structure that the school is currently using.
The district is proposing to keep all students together until they enter the second grade.
The plans call for using Snyder Primary School and Snyder Intermediate School for Pathway 1 and current Snyder Junior High School for Pathway 2, with all students attending Snyder High School together.
“Experiential learning (Pathway 2) is more of an opportunity for really hands-on, concrete learning experiences for students, and then they have the opportunity to apply it in a real-world setting,” McClain said. “For Marzano’s framework (Pathway 1), there’s still that opportunity for application, but it’s a little bit more structured on how instruction happens, and we monitor that, and students reach a certain competency level and then they work toward an application.”
McClain said that she personally gravitated more toward Pathway 2 simply because of her own personality and learning style, though she suspected preferences would differ.
“I have had students that I would have opted to put in Pathway 1, and I have students that I would have put in Pathway 2,” she said. “We’re trying to create an environment where teachers and students feel successful.”
The goal with the two pathways, McClain said, is to capitalize on student and teacher strengths so that they can work together to learn. With two classroom style options, the campus will be more capable of catering to student needs.
“We’re really focusing on how to develop instruction that gives students the opportunity to have an authentic learning setting,” McClain said.