The prototype — made of cardboard, pipe cleaners, and popsicle sticks — is one of many projects Coughlin has worked on this year at Collins Middle School during a “studio” session, a frequent part of a pilot program designed to reimagine middle school and reduce absenteeism rates.
The studio sessions, which often encourage students to brainstorm solutions to real-world problems, are only one unique component of the program, which ran its two pilot years at Collins, with a lottery-selected cohort of around 80 seventh- and eighth-graders. This fall, the district hopes to make the pilot the standard, expanding to more than 250 students, encompassing all district eighth-graders at both Collins and the Saltonstall School.
Advertisem*nt
The program is credited with reducing absenteeism at Collins, the city’s largest middle school.
Many middle-schoolers spend their days seated in desks, but students in this program are often immersed in active learning environments. They take weekly excursions off campus, including to a range of museums, the State House, the Ipswich River and Dam, and the New England Aquarium. Back in the classroom, their learning centers on what they experienced off campus.
“It’s actually making me excited to go to school,” Coughlin said. “It’s just like a happier version of school, and funner, too, because it’s so much more hands-on.”
It’s a seismic shift from sixth grade, Coughlin said, when school felt “regular, boring, and just average.”
For other students at Collins, field trips are few and far between — up to three times per year, according to the school’s website.
“With the pilot, we get to spice things up,” eighth-grader Liana Galvan told a group of education leaders and elected officials, including Senator Ed Markey, who traveled to Salem last month to tour classrooms and learn about the program.
Advertisem*nt
Galvan said immersion trips help her connect more with what she learns in the classroom, making subject matter feel more personal. In turn, she said she performs better on tests and thinks more creatively and analytically.
The pilot program “break[s] the boringness,” Galvan said, “of having to do the same old things, over and over again.”
Standard classes in the district move unit-by-unit through curriculums together; the pilot gives teachers flexibility to tweak lesson plans and schedules. Students say their education feels more personalized, with teachers at times adjusting the pacing of classes.
Fionn Coughlin, Seamus’s older brother, was hesitant to join the pilot at first, because it didn’t include the same advanced math classes he would take in the school’s standard programming. But the pilot staff was quick to adjust, said Fionn and Seamus’s mother, Joanne, and offered Fionn an individualized learning model through an online program that allowed students to move through material at different paces.
By the time Fionn finished eighth grade, he was working at upper high school math levels, his mother said.
Before the pilot, Joanne Coughlin said school could be difficult for Seamus, who, despite a knack for art, music, and creative thinking, often received negative feedback from teachers.
“Pure academic learning is not always his cup of tea,” she said. “Reading is difficult for him. He has a good dose of ADHD.”
But the pilot, she said, “flipped everything on its head.” Seamus came to love school. He and Fionn became immersed in their community, developed leadership skills, and displayed new passions for learning. They’ve shaken hands with the mayor, surveyed tourists at downtown Salem’s Haunted Happenings, and advised college students on how to vote in local elections.
Advertisem*nt
“They won’t forget what they learned in this program because it’s tied into real experiences, real building, real stuff, as opposed to reading about it,” their mother said. “They’re putting the questions out there to find solutions, and learning in the process. They are invested in what they’re doing.”
Other pilot students say they find school less boring and more engaging, which makes them more inclined to show up every day.
“There wasn’t really a voice for the students last year, and I feel like now there is,” eighth-grader Jaslyn Mejia Pena said. “I‘m learning things that I actually want to learn about and I’m really interested in. ... Students talk about what they want to learn about, not just what the teachers want to teach us.”
The model has proved successful. In 2021, the year before it was implemented, 28 percent of Collins middle-schoolers were chronically absent — defined by the state as missing at least 10 percent of the school year’s 180 days.
After the first round of the pilot, chronic absenteeism among Collins students decreased by half — 14 percent — then dropped to 10 percent after the second year. (Statewide, the average sits just under 20 percent for the 2023-24 school year through March, according to recently released state data.)
Students in the pilot improved academically, too, outperforming the rest of the school on both the English and math sections of the MCAS, the state’s standardized test.
Absenteeism rates soared nationwide amid the height of the pandemic. Since then, schools have grappled with turning around the trend with mixed success. In Massachusetts, chronic absenteeism is still higher than in 2019, though districts are making progress in bringing students back into the classroom more regularly.
Advertisem*nt
High absenteeism has been shown to be detrimental, particularly to low-income students, English learners, and students with disabilities. Research shows chronically absent students perform worse in school, graduate at lower rates, and have lower social engagement.
“How do you approach working with the adolescent brain?” said Chelsea Banks, the district’s dean of innovation and a main coordinator of the pilot. “We really believe in empowering their voice. ... Looking to the young people in the building to say, ‘How do you want to work, how do you want to learn, and what’s important to you?’ ”
After touring the school last month, Markey said the pilot shows “real potential for ensuring that children and teachers have the resources, but also the intentionality, of the school system to be more creative, to bring new ways to engage.”
Karen Tucker, an English and social studies teacher, said, “This year is different.” Not only for her students, who she said are more engaged, but also for her.
“The work in the pilot is energizing,” Tucker said. “I’m excited to come into work every day.”
Reflecting on his year in the program, Seamus Coughlin is proud of the models he made during studio. But the “deep-sea bot” he designed to sweep ocean trash, he said, isn’t even his best work. Just wait to see what he’ll create in eighth grade.
“I could do better,” he said. “Since being in pilot, it opened up my mind to so many things that are possible.”
Madeline Khaw can be reached at maddie.khaw@globe.com. Follow her @maddiekhaw.
