Bentonville Students Take the Lead in Reimagining What Education Can Be

This August, high school juniors and seniors in Bentonville Schools' Ignite Education Innovation pathway spent two days doing something most people don't associate with a career-exploration class: leading the conversation.

On Aug. 17 and 28, Dr. Kelly Hankins and Chrissy McNabb of the U of A Office of Innovation for Education (OIE) worked directly with the pathway's students, bringing the same Adaptive Schools lens the office typically uses to coach adults in school and district roles, one built around collaboration, facilitation and leadership, into a room full of teenagers considering a future in education.

Bentonville Ignite's Education Innovation strand isn't a traditional teacher-prep track. According to the district, it "goes beyond traditional teacher preparation by focusing on educational reimagining," combining STEM education, arts integration and student-centered design to equip students with the tools to build learning experiences that are inclusive, immersive and future-ready while staying grounded in the belief that today's classrooms must evolve as fast as the world around them. Students in the strand explore teaching, leadership and service across PK-12 and community-based educational settings, often through mentorships, internships and collaborative projects that connect what they're learning to real classrooms.

Hankins and McNabb's two days with the cohort focused less on content and more on capacity: which professional skills, such as active listening, paraphrasing, presuming positive intentions and navigating disagreement productively, best set students up to have the kind of conversations that actually move a group forward, and how those same skills translate directly into classroom practice.

For Kelli Moore, instructor in the Education Innovation strand at Bentonville Schools' Ignite program, that focus speaks directly to what Ignite is built to do.

"Across Ignite, one of our goals is to help students cross a bridge from being students who participate in group work to young professionals who know how to participate in, contribute to and, eventually, lead professional teams," Moore said. "In our Education Innovation strand, that goal is especially important because teaching is deeply collaborative work. Our partnership with the Office of Innovation for Education allowed us to intentionally empower our future educators by giving them the language, habits and practices of effective collaboration while they are still developing their professional identity — and then immediately put those skills into practice both in our classroom and in the immersive environments where they learn alongside educators across our district."

"After spending the last two years working with adults in school and district roles through Adaptive Schools, I was amazed by the depth these students brought — not just to their own thinking, but in the insights they shared with us," McNabb said. "They brought us new ideas and new learning as much as we brought it to them."

That exchange is very much the point of OIE's work. As a research and outreach unit housed in the U of A's College of Education and Health Professions, the office partners with schools, districts and communities across the state to build coaching, facilitation and school-support capacity. The work usually centers on practicing educators and school leaders; however, the Bentonville Ignite sessions gave Hankins and McNabb a chance to bring that same lens further upstream, to students who may be sitting in those same roles a few years from now.

For a pathway built on the premise that the students shaping tomorrow's classrooms should have a hand in imagining them, that exchange felt less like an add-on and more like proof of concept.