Today we’d like to introduce you to Laura Cole.
Laura, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I grew up in Dallas and moved to Northern California for college. My studies focused on Earth Sciences and Film Production. However, I always came back to the topic of education. When hired to create a video to pair with a geology textbook for Addison Wesley, I had the pleasure of interviewing my Stanford professors to produce a piece to explain simple geologic concepts.
My next job was to create a short documentary to show the child-centered experiences and unconventional practices at my childhood elementary school. This was an exciting project because I combined my passion for film production with my love for my own educational experience.
While raising my three children, I volunteered to raise money for and locate a new STEM curriculum for their California school. Years later, when I applied to study education at SMU, I had completed a long and winding path to become an educator. After 7 years at Good Shepherd Episcopal School as a science teacher, I accepted a brand new position as Educational Innovator for the new SPARQ lab. It has been a creative process with few limits to explore new ways to encourage deeper thinking in children.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc. – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
In my first year with SPARQ, we experienced pushback from some members of our community. A space designed to shake up traditional norms was threatening to some teachers, administrators and even parents. There were fears about trying and failing with these new things. Fortunately, the original concept came from the parent community, and the implementation came from the top members of administration. Those teachers who were excited about exploring and playing with new tools were the first to jump in. Over time, as others saw the successes, the buy-in grew. Parents and students expressed so much enthusiasm for SPARQ that the rest of the community simply had to find out more and embrace it. After 4 years, SPARQ is a core component of the Good Shepherd curricular program.
Looking ahead, we must keep responding to new information and experiences as we tweak tool choices and as we design the best use plan for the future. SPARQ must remain relevant and visionary as our students continue to solve problems and ask real-world questions.
We’d love to hear more about your business.
Good Shepherd Episcopal School prepares its students to succeed in a future world beyond our imagination. To support this goal, we developed our unique SPARQ Innovation Space more than four years ago. SPARQ stands for Solving Problems and Asking Real-world Questions and it offers an alternative to traditional classrooms in which desks are aligned in rows facing the front of the classroom and in which, a teacher disperses information to an audience of students. SPARQ is designed to disrupt this outdated view of teaching and learning. The space is located at the center of campus, within the library and with moveable tables and brightly colored upholstered seating cubes, the transformable space signals to participants that innovations happen here. The flexible seating and large floor space allow students to collaborate at tables, around computers, or on the floor as they choose or as the activity demands. Even the felt-covered dividing wall separating SPARQ from the rest of the library can be moved or removed, as needed. In addition, an exterior door opens to a crushed granite and grassy area – perfect for students to paint and use tools such as saws and drills. The flexible design of the space is meant to facilitate children’s creative thinking and collaboration to solve problems.
We intentionally designed SPARQ to promote students’ engaging in a culture of learning through making and playing. Failure is embraced as a learning opportunity. Rules for collaborations and brainstorms are enforced. Students and teachers co-create the expectations for each project, and often teachers and students discover something new alongside one another. It is not unusual for a student to hear a teacher say, “I don’t know the answer. Let’s find out.” Under these conditions, the students become leaders, and the teachers are facilitators. Students take ownership of the space and express pride in the fact that they drive their own learning here.
Teachers may use the space with staff support to try out new ways of teaching. Early projects used maker tools, high technology tools, and design thinking processes to deepen students’ learning. When students built a 6 foot tall pyramid based on their research and math knowledge, SPARQ worked perfectly. And other explorations using Minecraft needed serious redesign and planning before those tools were ready to use. Some of the best moments have included using wood blocks to build great sentences and constructing cardboard trunks to pack when students “immigrate” to the U.S. from assigned countries. Beautifully, on another project, music and Spanish students came together, speaking only in Spanish, to redesign primitive instruments. There has been great excitement over our students who are able to “make the pitch” for their own funding of learning projects through SPARQ Tank, a committee of local entrepreneurs who evaluate proposed projects.
Today, teachers’ creative confidence is up, and the need for SPARQ support has shifted. Now, more of these hands-on experiences take place in the classrooms. SPARQ is a quieter space now, and as such, seems ready for another growth spurt. A student team has decided to redesign the ways that we use the space moving forward. These students would like to see more independent, self-driven work throughout the day in a looser format. They are using the design process to come up with a workable plan that answers, “How might we further optimize independent student work in SPARQ?”
What were you like growing up?
I grew up in what is now called Preston Hollow. I played outside in the creek with my dogs, I rode my bike everywhere and I enjoyed my guitar. I was lucky to be a child during such a safe time in Dallas. I could be gone most of the day with no worries about bike-automobile accidents or stranger danger. My dreams were to live on a farm with 12 children, become a forest ranger or become a horse trainer. Though, I never ended up in any of those precise situations, I can say that as a parent to three, pet-parent to 6, who works with 600 children each day and rides horses, I have come close.
I hope to facilitate some of those independent, carefree childhood experiences for my students.
Pricing:
Contact Info:
- Address: 11110 Midway Road
Dallas, Texas 75229 - Website: www.gsesdallas.org
- Phone: 214-357-1610
- Email: lcole@gsesdallas.org
- Instagram: goodshepherdsparq & gseslearns
- Facebook: Good Shepherd Episcopal School
- Twitter: @gsessparq
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