The Pacific Salmon Summit: Fishing for Understanding

the client | the challenge | the strategy | results | visual tour

The Client

The clients were teachers of Grades 5 to 7 in one Canadian province (British Columbia) and two American states (Washington and Alaska). The teachers needed good resources that would allow students in grades 5 to 7 to engage in relevant, real and complex work. They were looking for meaningful ways in which students could use information tools and technology as part of their classroom work. And they were interested in participating in an international education project involving students from multiple communities and focused on an important real world issue that affected all the communities.

The Challenge

The challenge was to create a collaborative learning environment that would meet the needs identified by teachers while supporting a great deal of variation among the students and the classrooms. The program had to be flexible enough to accommodate different grade levels, different achievement levels, different student backgrounds, different curricula/standards/learning objectives, different school years, and different amounts of time each teacher could devote to the project. At the same time, the program needed enough structure so that the students could learn and share information, and feel well-prepared and able to participate with their peers at other schools.

The Strategy

7th Floor Media worked with teachers to create an integrated classroom and online program involving students in four coastal communities. The program would engage the students in an intensive six month collaborative investigation of the issues – environmental, biological, economic, and political – surrounding the salmon fishery on North America’s northwest coast. The program would involve the students in classroom, community, and online research into an issue of vital importance to their communities. 7th Floor Media created the Salmon Summit web site, providing publication tools and a forum allowing students to exchange their research and ideas. 7th Floor Media recruited panelists representing a wide range of perspectives from the three jurisdictions to be available through the web site to assist students and teachers with their inquiries. The site would also include rich-media resources developed by 7th Floor Media to provide students with jumping off places for investigation, as well as thought-provoking polls, teaching ideas for teachers, student and teacher forums, and a range of other tools for public and private information sharing.

In order to provide both structure and flexibility, 7th Floor Media defined a set of “milestone activities” – five sets of research questions that each class would answer regarding the biology, habitat, culture, fisheries and treaties related to salmon in their region. The completion of these “milestone activities”, the drafting of a “Statement of Concern” for another jurisdiction, and participation in a culminating face-to-face Summit were the minimum activities for each class. Other teaching ideas were provided, and teachers were free to integrate other lessons into the program to focus on areas that were of importance to them.

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Results

The Pacific Salmon Summit program demonstrated how information technology can play a meaningful and integral role in classroom and community learning. It illustrated the power of goal-oriented real-life problem-solving to motivate and inspire learning. It was an outstanding example of the seamless integration of a range of curriculum and learning objectives into problem-based learning. It demonstrated how a program can be flexible enough to accommodate the needs of different schools while structured enough to allow inter-school collaboration. It increased teacher engagement and made a significant contribution to teacher development. It serves as a unique model for international education, showing how to develop understanding and empathy across boundaries. And it serves as a model for the development of attitudes of environmental awareness and social responsibility among young people.

Key outcomes include:

Student learning of program-specific subject matter

In post-program testing and open-ended interviews, the participating students demonstrated:

Student skills development

In addition to subject-specific knowledge and skills, the students also developed their skills in the areas of research, note-taking, communication, collaboration, and consensus-building. Another important benefit of the project noted by the teachers was increased confidence on the part of the participating students.

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Student learning of non program-specific subject matter

Several teachers noted that, while the benefits for high achieving students – in allowing them to explore at a deep level – were obvious, in some ways the benefits to the traditionally low achievers were even more pronounced. One teacher noted that some students who had entered her class reading two grades below grade level were now reading at grade level. She attributed this change, at least in part, to the fact that the project provided the students with a compelling purpose for reading and comprehending challenging material. Another teacher noted that this was the first time she had observed one of her learning disabled students really interested in trying to read and understand written information.

Improved quality of student work

Teachers and students perceived a value in being able to publish and view student work on the web site. Both students and teachers felt that students worked harder and produced higher quality work when they knew that it would be published and other people would be looking at it. Certainly the extraordinary quality of the work published by the students on the Salmon Summit web site supports this perception.

Support for classroom differences

The project was successful in supporting the many differences among the classes. All the participating teachers felt that they were able to use the project effectively in their classes, and that all of their students, from marginal students to those at the high end, were able to achieve at their own level.

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Cross-curricular integration

Teachers wove a range of learning objectives throughout the term of the Pacific Salmon Summit project. Some of the learning objectives were predictable (e.g., life cycle and habitat objectives in the grade 5–7 curricula), while others might have been less anticipated. Curriculum areas teachers addressed through the Pacific Salmon Summit project included:

A learning experience greatly enhanced using information technology

In open-ended post-program interviews, all the participating teachers stated that this program effectively and meaningfully integrated information technology with classroom-based and face-to-face activities. All of them indicated that they would like to be involved in a project like this again, and that the online component of the program was critical. To quote one of the teachers:

“The whole web site technology component of this project was so motivating and such a good use of technology as compared to some of the software that tends to come in or just using Internet for who knows what… The web site was so critical for it being a ‘place.’ It was like our coming together place. It wouldn’t have worked with just email. We needed that. It was like a home base. It really was – a virtual home base.”

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Community involvement

Community involvement was extensive, particularly in the smaller communities. Experts in all the communities came into the classrooms to talk with the students and answer questions. In addition, students contacted individuals within the community who had special knowledge that the students wanted to access. Staff at local facilities visited by the students (e.g., canneries, hatcheries, aquaria, information centres) provided detailed information. Parents also became involved, both in providing information and in assisting with activities in the classroom (e.g., providing fish for dissection, assisting with dissections, helping to raise salmon). The level of community involvement is evidenced by the number of community members (including parents, local experts, school trustees) who paid their own way to travel to Vancouver and attend the final Summit.

Teacher support network

Participating teachers used the Teachers Forum on the Salmon Summit web site to provide each other with support. Teachers shared what they were doing in the classroom and how they were introducing concepts and ideas to their students, as well as what they were learning about the issues their classes were investigating. In post-Summit interviews, teachers also indicated that they found it reassuring to read that other teachers were struggling with the same concerns (e.g., regarding time constraints). Simply knowing that they were not alone, helped them feel that they could cope. To quote one teacher:

“I really liked having the teacher forum. I felt that that helped a lot with how much work there was. In some ways it was a shortcut for me for some of the information I needed to know, or just even contact – with [7th Floor Media], with all of the other teachers – it felt like there was some camaraderie building among us through the Teachers Forum, so that was invaluable for me.”

Teacher engagement and teacher development

For each of the participating teachers, taking part in this project was a professional development experience.

For some of the less experienced teachers, this was their first exposure to authentic problem-based education and, indeed, the first time they had not taught from a textbook. The project opened their eyes to possibilities for teaching they had never thought of. For these teachers, the project may have transformed their teaching practice for the future.

For the more experienced teachers the project also stretched them in ways they might not have anticipated. Learning how to integrate the use of technology into their classroom teaching and learning was eye-opening for these teachers. For these teachers, as well, the project opened their eyes to the power of relevant real-world questions to motivate and engage their students.

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Visual Tour

This is the home page of the Salmon Summit web site. From the home page, participants could sign in or participate in a weekly poll.

From the home page, participants could also access a range of topic-related resources and publication tools using the “Salmon” menu on the left, or share ideas and information through the menu at the top right.

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In consultation with the teachers, we decided to divide the Salmon Summit site into five topic areas: biology, habitat, culture, fisheries, and treaties. Each topic area has a unique multimedia introduction. The following pages are a sampling of screens from the topic introductions.

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For each topic area, we recruited panelists representing a range of perspectives from Alaska, British Columbia, and Washington. Questions submitted to the panel through the web site by participating students were forwarded to the panelists, and responses from the panelists were posted on the web site, together with the name of the respondent.

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The very first activity for the participants was to share some information about themselves, their schools, and their communities. Each class wrote brief narratives about their school and community, including photographs.

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Each class also provided answers to a common set of questions, and was able to
compare its answers with those provided by the other classes.

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Simple forms allowed students to publish personal biographies with pictures. (Access to the student biographies was restricted to participants.) Each school also had a newsletter in which students could publish articles of general interest.

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Student and teacher forums on the Salmon Summit web site were venues for an active exchange of ideas — although not always of perfect spelling!

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