Seven Chattanooga museums, working
closely with school principals, teachers, and parents, are
using museum collections to enhance and energize the curricula
of two museum magnet schools in Magnifying the Museums:
Enhancing Chattanooga’s Museum Magnet School Partnership.
The project was funded by the Institute of Museum and
Library Services (IMLS) through a National Leadership Grant
(NLG) due to its depth of the interaction with the schools
and curriculum content, and the involvement of a wide range
of museums.
“The curricula are so engaging and the students are
so motivated and excited,” said Jill Levine, Principal
of the Normal Park Museum Magnet School. “The students
remember what they’ve learned a year later and that
translates into increased test scores. The partnership between
the school and the museums is changing the way our kids think.
They ask a lot of questions and they love learning.”
Among the project’s many stimulating elements are
weekly in-museum learning experiences called Learning Expeditions.
Students enjoy dozens of in-museum programs on topics ranging
from Cherokee culture to edible plants to Appalachian biodiversity.
After each quarter, students host “Exhibit Night”
at their schools where they display their own imaginative
exhibits based on the Learning Expeditions, and, as docents,
teach their parents what they’ve learned. Some of the
exhibits are displayed in “real world” museums.
During the course of the three-year grant, students from the
two partner schools visited partner museums more than 35,000
times. An unexpected side benefit: middle schools students
are volunteering at museums after school and during the summer,
said Henry Schulson, Executive Director of the Creative Discovery
Museum, a partner museum.
The project began in 2000 when the Hamilton County School
District opened a museum magnet elementary and middle school
as part of a larger magnet school initiative. The Chattanooga
school superintendent invited the Tennessee Aquarium and six
other museums to become educational partners with the Chattanooga
Middle Museum Magnet School (CMMMS) and Normal Park Museum
Magnet (NPMM). The consortium included Chattanooga Nature
Center, Creative Discovery Museum, Chattanooga African-American
Museum, Chattanooga Regional History Museum, Hunter Museum
of American Art, Tennessee Aquarium and the Chattanooga Zoo,
which joined in 2006. The presence of seven museums ensured
the program’s sustainability over the long term because
it allowed the work load to be spread over the entire group.
IMLS awarded a National Leadership Grant to this project in
2004 to further enhance this unique Museum Magnet School partnership.
Principal Levine said that a critical component of the IMLS
grant was the opportunity for teachers from both schools to
spend an entire week learning about the museum partners, planning
their Learning Expeditions and Field Studies, and working
with education consultants.
“Unless we give focused time for teachers to plan,
think, and work with the museums, it wouldn’t happen.
The teachers and the museum educators sit around a big table
and plan the curricula,” said Heather DeGaetano, Director
of Development at the Tennessee Aquarium and NLG project director.
In addition to the week-long summer planning session, each
quarter the schools have a planning day where teachers, school-museum
liaisons, and museum partners work together to plan the upcoming
quarter’s Learning Expeditions. Once the Learning Expeditions
are planned, the liaisons schedule the schools’ visits
to museums, arrange special programs with museum staff, guide
groups at the museums, and bring outreach programs to the
schools.
“We plan the programs together. It allows us to show
the kids a lot more of the museum collections because they
connect directly into their curriculum,” DeGaetano said.
Partner museums have worked hard to understand how schools
work and to make the schools feel part of the museum family.
The Passport Program, for example, gives museum magnet school
students, parents, and teachers free admission to all seven
participating museums. Parents are offered involvement hours
for using the Passport to attend museums, which they can apply
to the 18 hours of parental involvement required each school
year. The Passports also allowed teachers to visit museums
on their own time, view the newest exhibits, and gain a more
complete understanding of their partners' missions.
“Sometimes you have to just open your doors. It wasn’t
prohibitively expensive and it’s worth the investment
from the museums’ point of view because our collections
are used in an ongoing basis and we can have a meaningful
impact on school children,” Schulson said.
Museums experience other benefits such as strengthening their
own educational efforts by testing out programs on the students.
“We tested out a program on biofuels so the schools
acted as learning labs. This is very valuable to museums,”
he said. “We are developing new programs that can be
used with any school that brings in students to learn.”
Museums are taking the program farther, for example, by forming
an educator’s roundtable called the Association of Chattanooga
Museum Educators to consider joint programming, ways to support
regional schools, and efforts to continue the work begun by
this grant.
“We had done some work with other museums but this
project improved communication and bettered our relationships.
We are now sharing ideas and information to build capacity
across the museum community. I know someone at every museum
now,” DeGaetano said
“One of the reasons it worked well in Chattanooga is
that the city, schools, and museums were committed to the
collaboration,” Schulson noted.
The investment in collaboration has paid off. Teachers, students,
and parents are more comfortable using museums and museums
have a better understanding of how to serve those audiences.
Teachers and museum staff are trying new and innovative approaches
to teaching students through a museum curriculum. Teachers
participate in after-school and summer fellowships where they
develop new programs and resources for use by the museums
in their work with schools across the region.
Success breeds success: Normal Park won the Ronald P. Simpson
Distinguished Merit Award from Magnet Schools of America in
2005 and has been named a School of Excellence every year
since 2004. Other districts are visiting to see if they might
adopt some of the best practices, Levine said. This fall,
the Chattanooga Middle School will become part of the Normal
Park Museum Magnet School to ensure continuity within the
program.
“Since we started, magnet schools are cropping up across
the country,” Levine said. “We’ve had visitors
from Miami, Knoxville, and Springfield schools that have adopted
our model for their own schools. So there are little Normal
Parks all across the country. The grant is not just about
us, it’s about sharing the model across the country.”
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