Creating the Arete PBL Academy at Neenah High School: The Beginnings

Two years ago, there had been no PBL program at Neenah High School. The plan was to start with a 9th grade cohort, and they would have the opportunity to progress through high school being the first group of PBL students at that grade level.  Our initial team of teachers for the 9th grade included Lynn Heyn in physical science, Tara Meinke in Algebra, Suzy Weisgerber in Global Studies and me in English.

At our original meeting in the spring of 2014, we tried to put together our ideas and standards into groups we thought would make sense for each unit.  In our initial meeting, we planned projects for the entire year based each unit on a big idea from the 9th grade Global studies curriculum.  We decided that using Global Studies would be easiest as the center point because the rest of us could incorporate our standards into some aspect of Global Studies.

From the onset, we made tons of mistakes. Possibly the biggest was our phrasing of what the program was about.  We emphasized that the program was for people who were smart, curious and despite possessing knowledge, did not do well on tests, thinking we would have students who were as excited about the opportunity to learn in a more meaningful way as we were to teach it.  The middle school teachers and counselors looked at our description of the type of students who we thought would be successful in the program and selected about 80.  We met with the students and we excitedly talked about projects which combined all the subjects and that the learning would be shown through projects.  Somehow the only message many of them heard was there were "no tests" and they listened no further.

Our next step was choosing a name for the program. We chose the name Arete  Academy because we felt the Greek definition of the word (striving for excellence) fit our overall goals for our us and for the students.

Shortly thereafter,  we went to the Innovative Schools Network PBL conference in June, hoping to learn about effective implementation of a PBL  program, creating and assessing projects and any other tips or tricks we could pick up.  We did learn some of that and did make some connections with other PBL schools throughout Wisconsin, but we were discouraged when we heard from many people that constructing a PBL program that included all core content areas in a public high school was impossible. We were determined to prove the experts wrong.