Community School - Dr. Cindy McMahon

 

            Aug. 12: Rotary Connects Begins at 4:30 p.m.  Art and Robin Rudd’s house, 1604 W. Fairway Drive.

 

            Aug. 19: Luncheon, noon at Nectar in Kendall Yards, Spokane Transit Central Line, the electric bus route from Browne’s Addition to Spokane Community College.

 

            Aug. 26, Rotary Serves, noon, Holmes School supplies delivered, 2600 W. Sharp. Pizza provided, thanks to project coordinator Sandy Fink.

 

            Sept. 20: Club fund-raising wine tasting and dinner at Kalispel Golf and Country Club.  Tickets will be distributed soon.  Project coordinator Lenore Romney reminds members to gather vintage bottles for the fund-raising “wine grab.”

 

            Welcome!: Rotarian Steve Perry, who recently moved here from Wilsonville, Ore., has applied to join the club.

 

            Quiet moment: Invocator Dave Hayward led a solemn moment of silence for the victims and families of the mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio.  He then led the member in “God Bless America.”

 

            Do you have to be born smart to be smart?

 

            Not necessarily, if you learn how to work with motivation, personality and development by teaching students to love challenges.

 

            That summarizes the work of Carol Dweck, an educator from Yale and Barnard who developed her education ideas at Stanford University.

 

            And Dweck’s work inspires The Community School, 1025 W. Spofford, where Dr. Cindy McMahon, the TCS principal, also loves challenges.

 

            TCS, with 160 students in four high-school grades, uses a project-based learning instructional approach that empowers, engages and enables its students with a variety of  outcomes.

 

            McMahon, who spoke at the Aug. 5 club meeting, said she her school “takes new learning in a new direction.”  She said to help with the new techniques the staff members went to a workshop in Orlando.  “Teachers” at TCS are called “facilitators of learning.”

 

            She said “it’s hard to get out of the mind-set of ringing the bell” for five traditional classes, like science to math to English.  At TCS, the students work on problem-based, problem-learning methods with the nine faculty members who often team-teaching and bring in outside help to meet the students’ challenges.  Most projects span six to seven weeks.

 

            Raising to those challenges, some 200 area businessmen, college educators and others have offered their expertise, McMahon said, adding “it’s a microcosm of the real world.”

“I could be retired, but I don’t want to stop doing this,” she said.  “The kids are so passionate” to learn.

 

            “How much do you remember from traditional classes (in high school)?” she asked, saying the challenges at TCS are very memorable.

 

            So are the results.  The graduation rate at TCS last year was 100 percent.  And TCS received the 2019 School of Distinction Award by the Center for Educational Effectiveness.

 

            Answering members’ questions, she said transcripts from TCS are graded the same way to meet collegiate standards.

 

            But she said “contracts” are developed for each new project and teammates must defend their results.

 

            McMahon often must explain TCS concepts and results to those unfamiliar with the process.

 

            She acknowledges that “often our own district doesn’t know what we are doing.”