West Bath students communicate their learning clearly and effectively for a wide variety of audiences.

West Bath Students strive to communicate their thinking and learning effectively to a wide variety of audiences. Communication occurs in multiple ways for a variety of purposes: through persuasive writing, public presentations to educate and/or inform, public presentations to educate and/or persuade, public services announcements, and through celebration passages. Through the recursive process of writing, students are engaged with deeper learning, as students are required to think critically, they synthesize complex ideas and consider multiple perspectives in their writing pieces or presentations, they are able to understand how the work that they are doing connects to real-world issues, needs, and lives, and students ask and respond to questions that promote critical thinking and inquiry. Additionally, the communication process is courageous, embracing a process of risk taking, growth, and revision. Effectiveness is measured via rubrics and exit tickets, public response, and whether or not the communications resulted in action.

One aspect of communication is the ability to write effective persuasive letters. Students learn that in a persuasive letter, they must be able to communicate their point concisely, share information about why their point of view is important, and convince the reader that this perspective and any action needed is necessary. One way to determine the effectiveness of persuasive writing is whether or not action was taken as a result of the letter.

West Bath students have utilized persuasive letters as products of expeditions and case studies numerous times over the several years of partnership. In earlier expeditions, persuasive letters were included with products, encouraging community members to plant flowers to save pollinators, or to buy locally to support Maine industries. While the letters are compelling, the effectiveness of these letters could not be measured. In more recent expeditions, persuasive letters were directed to a specific audience, such as the school principal, land owners, or the school board. The effectiveness of the students' communication could then be measured by actions taken.

First Grade Persuasive Letters to School Principal Requesting a Trash Can on the Playground (2016)

Third Grade Persuasive Letters to Target Landowners Requesting Permission to Install a Bat House (2017)

In addition to targeting the audience more specifically, growth in quality of the student writing is evidenced over time, which increases effectiveness of communication. In the 2017 third grade letter, the student has a strong opening paragraph, and gives 3 reasons to support his opening request, along with 3 facts to support each of his 3 reasons. He ends with a closing that summarizes his purpose. The sample letter is clear and compelling, and was effective in that the bat houses were installed.

Celebrations of Learning

West Bath School holds two Celebrations of Learning per year. The winter celebration, at the conclusion of the first set of expeditions, is focused on process and reflection, and provides students with an opportunity to hear feedback on their work. The spring celebration is culminating, and provides students with an opportunity to present and be docents of their work. Classrooms are set up so that visitors move through stations as though they are following the steps of expeditions. At the completion of the student presentations, visitors will have experienced the full expedition. Students spend time planning, preparing for, and rehearsing the content that they choose to deliver at their station, and following the celebration, reflect on their ability to communicate clearly.

In order to communicate effectively, students need to know and understand their content well enough to share the information they have learned and answer questions correctly, they also need to use strong speaking, fluent voices, make eye contact, and reference their display materials while they speak. In the two clips, the kindergarten student who is presenting for the first time, relies on questions cues from visitors to help to get him started with his presentation, while the fourth grade student, who has presented at several celebrations, is able to speak fluently and without the need for note cards.

All visitors at the Celebration of Learning leave exit tickets to provide feedback on the student presentations. Additionally, students reflect on their presentations, and debrief as a class how well they did explaining their content and utilizing their presentation skills. This information then informs changes that need to happen for the next public presentation to enable their public communication to be even more effective in the future. West Bath's Celebrations of Learning are not just an event that happens at the end of an expedition. The presentations themselves are a process of student learning, as they self-assess and reflect, striving towards higher quality work and higher quality presentations.

Another example of the deeper learning process in action in relation to the Celebration of Learning can be seen with the reflective cycle below. The students reviewed the exit tickets that visitors left from their spring 2017 Celebration of Learning to better understand information that they effectively shared with visitors, to celebrate warm feedback, and to hear areas in which students could improve their presentation skills. Some of those areas where they received feedback were to speak louder and slower, to make better eye contact, and to stay on topic while presenting. The first graders then summarized the exit tickets as part of their debrief, which helps to create a plan for improvement for the next opportunity they have to present.

Fourth Grade Panel Presentations at The Green Crab Working Summit

Growth in Public Speaking Video Productions - Kindergarten to Fifth Grade

We spend the first trimester of kindergarten learning about EL Education best practices for learning. We learn terminology for effective students and spend weeks exploring the West Bath School's 6 character traits. The Kindergarten Class of 2018 created a video to inform incoming kindergarten students about our Code of Character. Each student described how a character trait could be demonstrated around the school, wrote that description multiple times, performed and then narrated their description. To create this video, the students labored over voice control, speed, and clarity of their description. This is the first experience many of these students were expected to revise a task multiple times.

Fifth Grade Boat Building Open House

Students hosted an open house at the Maine Maritime Museum Boat Shop to share their boat building experiences, learning, and the skiffs to date. Students prepared speeches to share with the crowd, explaining what the boat shop experience had meant to them as learners and citizens. The purpose of the open house is to provide a forum for the community to build an understanding of the program, ask questions of the students, and hopefully to develop support for continuing the boat building program in the future. As a result of the effective speaking and communication of the students at the open house, the School Board of Directors approved funding for the program for the next school year at their very next meeting.

Second Grade Expedition - Placing West Bath on the Map (2016)

In the second grade expedition of Placing West Bath on the Map, students need to develop an understanding of what makes up a country, a state, and a community, and how counties, states, and communities are recognized. Case studies led students from large studies of counties, to a focused study of the state of Maine, to an in-depth study of our local community. As an outcome of their expedition, the students wanted to create a product that put West Bath School, the heart of the town of West Bath, on the map, and proposed that they install a new school sign. The students spoke to the school board of directors, asking for support for their project. Additionally, they spoke to the Parent Teacher Organization, requesting additional financial support. Demonstrating effectiveness of communication, both the School Board of Directors and the Parent Teacher Organization granted the request of the students. The School Board Chair thanked the students for taking the time to stand up and advocate for something they believed in.

The New School Signs

Fifth Grade School Board Presentation - Chewonki

As part of the fifth grade expedition, West Bath students participate in a 3 night, 4 day camping trip at Chewonki Foundation. Through this experience, students develop background to support the guiding question, How can I alter the environmental impact of my choices on places that are important to me? Additionally, the goals of the trip are participate in citizen scientist work on human ecology and environmental systems, and develop team building, survival, and estuary/ecology skills. Following the experience, the fifth grade students develop a presentation to present to the School Board of Directors to demonstrate that the experience is valuable and to ask that they continue to support it.

As a result of the students' presentation, the School Board of Directors agreed to fund the experience for another year.

The purpose of a Public Service Announcement (PSA) is to provide free information with the goal of changing the public's attitudes and behaviors towards a social issue. Throughout West Bath's relationship with EL Education, communicating social issues for the purpose of promoting ideas and the common good has been a regular facet of expeditions. As was our experience with persuasive writing, early expeditions, while focused on interesting topics, did not always have the PSAs focused on the right audience, as with the New Meadows Estuary Propaganda postcards. This was not a topic that engaged the general community, and did not truly contribute to the common good. A later sample of a PSA, focused on saving our beloved local beach from erosion, was more meaningful in content, but the work was not high-quality enough to distribute. The final PSAs in this sample, created in 2018 by the Summer Stem students, were created in partnership with the Maine Audubon to help to save the piping plovers. Maine Audubon had expressed the need of having brochures to post and distribute at beaches, giving our students a real authentic audience for the PSAs.

Third Grade New Meadows Estuary Propaganda (2013)

Second Grade Popham Beach Erosion Persuasive Letters and PSAs (2016)

Summer STEM Club (2018)

Each June, our out going 5th grade students are encouraged to write and submit a speech to share during step-up, regarding how their time at West Bath has influenced them as a person and student. Students are selected to read their speeches during our closing ceremony at the end of the year. All of the speeches included are samples of effective communication, as they respond to the prompt, are personal, contain a message, and have closings that let the listeners know that the student is headed off to do great things. However, the progression of speeches over the years are also evident. The most recent student speech included demonstrates effective communication by being written as an extended metaphor, and by linking her West Bath School experience with some of the critical aspects of her EL Education.

The speeches below show the growth over time in regards to student communication. All meet the criteria of effective communication. However, you will see that the first connects with the audience at an emotional level and walks the audience through some of the outcomes of his experience as a student. The second sample shows the progression of linking the students' personal experience to school goals. The third sample is the first time that we see an extended metaphor as an exit speech - her school experience as it relates to the butterfly life cycle.