Windsor Locks School Officials Embracing Being Orchestrators in the Classroom

As administrators updated the Windsor Locks Board of Education Thursday about how curriculum initiatives are progressing, they spoke of how teaching methods are evolving.

Superintendent of Schools Wayne Sweeney said teachers start out lecturing but then begin to engage the students into participating in their learning. The students are the workers and the teacher are the orchestrators.

Sweeney said they are changing the method in which students come to school to watch teachers work. Now students come to school to work and play a larger roll in their own learning, he said.

Windsor Locks Middle School Principal Gregory Blanchfield said the changes they’re making in classrooms are completely different than how he taught when he first started his career. The teachers are excited about what they’re doing.

“It’s going to take time but teachers are working hard to make it happen,” Blanchfield said.

Windsor Locks High School Principal Sharon Cournoyer said as high school teachers they are used to teaching content and not orchestrating students. Now teachers are anxious to visit other classrooms to see how their colleagues are implementing techniques and how they are succeeding.

“Our teachers are embracing it,” Cournoyer said.

Sweeney said 40 years ago teachers taught something, students regurgitated it long enough to take a test and then 30 days later forgot what they learned. Now educators are getting students to internalize what they’re learning by working in the classroom.

“We’re asking our teachers to defy everything they learned in teacher training,” Sweeney said. “The district’s never going back. The genie’s out of the bottle.”