Promising Practices

Whitley County Middle School

Who Wants to Be An Architect?

This program focuses on helping our GUKY students here at Whitley County Middle School develop a life long love of math by initiating a fun, rigorous, and challenging week long math camp. Once in place we hope to be able to duplicate it as a summer, spring break, and after school enrichment program. The intended audience was any math student in the school with an interest in real life math application. The students applying were accommodated with appropriate resources prior to arriving.

Our math department, which is comprised of six teachers, were offered teaching spots based upon the number of slots reserved by our students. They developed collaboratively, a unit of study relating to the math necessary to architects. This unit was five days long and included measurement and making a scale drawing of different areas of our schoolhouse, technology integration with a day of math work using existing software, a day of exploration of various materials donated to our school by a variety of architectural firms and visiting interesting buildings. The culminating activity involved the actual practice of designing, drawing, and building to scale an actual garage or cottage. Special programs were added to explore career opportunities and college and degree requirements.

We had three architects give up their time to train our math teachers on various skills necessary to fulfilling our goals. We had our teachers trained to various aspects related to their curriculum for implementation during the camp.

The math camp hosted a total of seventeen students for one week with four teachers. All have agreed to come back next time to coach and mentor another student. Also, during the 2003-2004 year we plan to plot their math scores on state assessment to compare with other students to start to establish baselines for looking at continued programs.

The total cost of camp was relatively inexpensive. We paid a stipend per hour to our instructors. Materials and resources were purchased for each participant, along with non-consumable items, i.e., tape measures which can be reused. Other resources were in-kind, including visits to architect firms, Styrofoam building materials, cutting blades, glue, plans, old scale models of buildings, including our school. Our school system provided one bus and driver for field trips to study architecture.

Standards and Indicators for Success:

• Standard 1.1e The school curriculum provides specific links to continuing education, life, and career options.
  
  
• Standard 2.1b Teachers collaborate in the design of authentic assessment tasks aligned with core content subject matter.
  
  

Contact Information:

Richard E. Prewitt, Principal
Whitley County Middle School
351 Boulevard of Champions
Williamsburg, KY 40769
(606) 549-7050
rprewitt@whitley.k12.us