Stonington ― While students enjoyed their summer break, teachers and administrators were working on a pilot project that will allow middle school students to study a topic that interests them at Mystic Seaport Museum.

A collaboration between the museum and the district will provide students the opportunity to explore what interests them and motivates them in the half-year course that will include onsite classes at the museum.

The course, which will be broadly based on a theme of the land and the sea, will incorporate new teaching methods to allow students more freedom of choice, improve student engagement, and teach them new ways of thinking.

Superintendent of Schools Mary Anne Butler explained last week that the changing nature of education and teacher shortages mean that classrooms and learning will look quite different in the future, and certified teachers will not be the only people educating students.

Thinking about what that future might include, the district and Mystic Seaport worked together on a plan for educators at both institutions to learn from each other. Eventually that led to the idea of the collaboratively taught course.

Approximately 14 seventh grade students will spend the first part of the course, which will run during the second semester, learning the skills they need to focus their curiosity and narrow down their individual areas of interest. Teachers will provide a basic framework and guidelines, but beyond that it will be up to students to make the decisions.

The second part of the course will involve classes held at the museum.

“There will be Seaport educators at the school and then our teachers and students will be at the Seaport as the semester unfolds,” she said.

Butler said the plan for the course, which will meet twice in every six-day schedule rotation, is to have one of the class periods be the last block of the day in case students need extended time at the museum. On those days, she said it would be possible to have the late buses pick the students up at the museum for transportation home or make it back to the school for students to catch the buses.

Museum educators and middle school educators will spend time this fall learning the techniques, tools and skills their counterparts use in order to best guide students as they decide what they want to learn about, how they want to learn it, and how they will demonstrate their learning.

In this way, the course offers a wide variety of freedom to pursue individual interests and adapts to students of all learning styles.

“There might be some kids that are really interested in museum artifacts or museum curating; it could be somebody who is actually interested in tourism, or it could be someone who is interested in sea shanties. We have no idea what these kids might come up with,” Butler said.

The varied approaches mean teachers will have to adapt and be comfortable with a level of ambiguity because they will not know what the students will decide to focus on within the broad theme of the land and the sea.

“We really want to have some deliberate, designed lessons for the children to start the second semester, but as that semester goes on there will be more and more student- driven work around the questions that they generate,” she said.

If it seems broad, that is because it is designed that way.

This self-directed approach to student learning stems from a teaching protocol developed through 25 years of research and work done by the Right Question Institute in Cambridge, Mass.

The Question Formulation Technique teaches students techniques and a process to ask questions.

The seemingly simple concept teaches students not only how to structure and think about questions, but to refine them and plan how to use the questions to find answers.

By not just answering questions provided by a teacher, the process helps develop complex thinking skills, builds confidence and independence, and gives students a sense of ownership over their learning, resulting in greater comprehension, increased learning, flexibility of thought and more student engagement, according to the technique.

Collaboration with community organizations is not new to the district. The school system also collaborates with Mystic Aquarium, the Yellow Farmhouse, the La Grua Center, and the New England Science and Sailing Foundation among others.

“We want to start small because we know there are going to be a lot of hiccups,” Butler said about the Seaport program.

The school will send out an interest survey to all the seventh graders during the first semester to gauge interest and will meet with selected students and their families multiple times before the course begins.

“This is a really kind of cutting-edge practice for the district, and we are hoping very much that we will fine tune this and not only offer it on a larger scale at the middle school next year, but I would love also to bring up that model up to the high school,” she said.