Bloomfield Middle School: bmsSTRONG with Project Backpack!

"It is not that I’m so smart. But I stay with the questions much longer.’"–Albert Einstein

What is the purpose of school? What does it mean to be a community? Being a part of the Nelson County family means wrestling with big picture questions continuously to reflect and grow in our ability to serve students, families, each other, and our community. Bloomfield Middle School is taking part in the conversation around Project Backpack. The idea is that our focus in school should be on developing qualities that really matter like collaboration, creativity, caretaking, and more. These dispositions will be vital to ensuring that the knowledge gained from school can be put to good use. BMS students will be our future and they must use their interpersonal skills to solve real world problems with others. 

On February 4th our House Governors and Care and Connect Leaders met to discuss the purpose of school and reflect on experiences that we are currently creating at Bloomfield Middle School. We identified that we must ensure students can identify the qualities of the 5 C's and grow in them daily. 

                                                                                    

Students identified that the purpose of school is to gain knowledge but to also grow socially. Our care and connect leaders voiced that they appreciate teachers that challenge them daily and provide new knowledge that can be used and applied in the real world. One question they all agreed that they hear a lot is "where will I use this in real life" from peers in the classroom. If students do not feel something is relevant, they are not intrinsically motivated to learn. In addition, students must learn to be stronger collaborators as outlined in Project Backpack. This requires us to focus on creating experiences that ask students to work together to solve problems.

BMS has made a lot of changes this year already with the start of our House system, election of student leaders, community meeting, and now we are in the process of creating intentional experiences for students. Our care and connect leaders have noticed and they wish to play a role in designing these learning experiences as we grow further!

Teachers met on February 5th and we focused on developing an understanding for the vision around project backpack. Our goal was to develop clarity around this process to begin. Since this is an emerging idea and we cannot predict exactly where this will lead us as a school, this wasn't easy! However, there is no doubt that our students will benefit from an intentional focus on the 5 C's that we started identified in the start of our conversation.

We geared the conversation by identifying the experiences we have already created that help develop these skills. We then discussed how we can further this conversation at and utilize this focus to move our vision forward and become bmsSTRONG! 

Next Steps: One of our goals moving forward is to continue creating experiences for students in the form of field trips, off campus work based learning, and project based learning experiences at every grade level and content. Through these experiences, we must embed Project Backpack and the 5 C's as a focal point in our feedback to students. Students must constantly be reflecting on these dispositions amidst the work to think about their own growth. Our next step is to reimagine how we communicate this as a school and embed these skills in our daily procedures, routines, and learning experiences.