I Am A Rural Teacher: Mary McHugh - Sweet Briar, ND

Like so many rural teachers, home for Mary McHugh is synonymous with a school that has become as much a part of her as she is to her students, fellow teachers, and community. Sweet Briar, a K-8 school near Mandan, North Dakota, is where both Mary and her children went to school. After teaching math in Bismarck for several years, Mary returned back to Sweet Briar and fostered an environment of innovation that has amplified learning in a school with a long legacy of great culture and community connections.

“I started as a math teacher, [and I] taught eighth grade math– which I loved– and I kind of transitioned into a more of a math instructional coach role, and started doing staff development with Bismarck, which was really great for me, because I got to see a lot of teachers teaching. I also got a lot of professional development in that role. Because if you're going to be doing staff development, you get opportunities that I didn't have as a classroom teacher, and it was really fun to learn just a lot of different things that could happen in schools, and start thinking about how schools could look different.” Realizing that she could start putting those ideas into action in a smaller school, a return home to Sweet Briar several years ago offered Mary the opportunity she was looking for.

She describes that “in a school the size of Sweet Briar, you can kind of hit the ground running, and you can pretty quickly make any changes that you want to see happen. I always think it's kind of the blessing of a small school is that you have a ton of flexibility if you want change.” At Sweet Briar, Mary teaches 5th - 8th grade, while also serving as the director for the school of 29 students. She says that while she is still a full-time classroom teacher, “I'm also in an administrative role for the school, where I get to make a lot of decisions about budgeting and curriculum and things like that. So it's kind of a nice blend of, you're in the classroom, so you're going to use all of this stuff, but you also get to make some decisions. That was a great combination that I was really excited about.”

Spurred along by pandemic-necessitated changes, Mary began to rethink basic elements of the school, such as the schedule and assessment style. “One big change that was different from how the kids had experienced learning at Sweet Briar is that we really took a focus off grades and grading and really tried to focus on learning.” Students still get standards-based letter grades at year end, but instead the weekly focus is on feedback and meeting students where they are at. This proved an especially effective idea in multi-grade classrooms: “So wherever you're at today, I'm trying to meet you where you're at and giving you the best that I can for you today, and I want you to take advantage of that tomorrow. We'll come back and we'll pick up [tomorrow].”

Mary shares that when high school students from Bismarck came to do a field experience for their introduction to teaching class, the engagement from the students in the absence of frequent grading challenged basic assumptions they held about why students learn: “They asked the kids, ‘well, if that's not graded, why would you do it?’ They're high school kids, and they're thinking to themselves, well, if you're not going to get a grade on it, why would you do it? And the [Sweet Briar] kid responds, ‘Well, why wouldn't you, don't you want to learn?’ And the high school kid was like, ‘Huh?’ But that was just kind of eye opening; [our] mentality, is like, why wouldn't you want to do it?’”

Shifting how lessons are taught to project-based learning, where students engage in multidisciplinary activities that utilize combinations of art, language arts, math, science, and other subjects both dovetails with the separation from frequent grading and has increased both engagement and how much students learn and retain information and concepts. “Overall, it's encouraging. . . The state of North Dakota puts out a matrix of student achievement versus student growth. And so, of course, you want to be in that high achievement-high growth [quadrant]. And we have been for the last however many years they’ve been putting it out.”

Perhaps one big reason for both the high schoolers’ confusion and the high proficiency scores is that Mary and her team continually transfer the ownership of their learning back to the students. A task board, where students can independently select when they work on certain subjects or projects, fosters an environment where students are trusted to complete their work in a sequence that suits their needs and interests, rather than a one-size-fits-all, top-down approach. “We're always trying to move towards more student ownership. So where can students make a choice, and where can they have more self assessment? Where can they have more say in what they're doing?”

The community and parents have stood behind Mary as she and her team have modernized learning at Sweet Briar, and the support that she feels from them is part of what makes teaching at Sweet Briar such a special experience. “We have a ton of parental support. And our parents come from everywhere, from as close as a mile up the road. You have parents that might drive 20 or even more miles to get here. So the parents that have chosen Sweetbriar, I feel like, are choosing it for a reason. They like how we're different.” That support includes making field trips possible, providing maintenance services to the school, and donations or other in-kind gifts whenever necessary.

“They come through for us every time. We've never not been able to go somewhere that we want to go. And it can even be, like, ‘Hey, we have an opportunity to get to the capitol and tour the capitol. It's happening in three days. Can we get help?’ And we always will have people.” This extends to learning at or near the school, as well: “I feel one way that our local community is really helpful is in sharing their talents, their features. . . we were doing a big agriculture-heavy unit. And so we had a farmer show up, and he'd gone out and pulled out some different corn and soybean stalks. And he came with different soybean stocks at various [stages of] development and talked about that.”

Moving amongst her students, from a whole-group math lesson, to supervising interdisciplinary projects, to quiet one-on-one instruction, Mary is at home in her dynamic classroom. To a new visitor, the structure of the classroom appears to more closely resemble a college-style lab than your typical middle school environment, where students have fun while staying on task and have space to explore their passions, interests, and curiosities. For Mary McHugh, this environment is home.

Thank you to Mary McHugh for sharing her rural teacher story with Rural Schools Collaborative. Want to share your story as a rural educator? Fill out our online submission form here.

Learn more about RSC's North Dakota Hub, here.

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