Learning by remote, in a remote prairie town

Family and consumer sciences teacher Charlotte Mohling takes a modern-day one-room schoolhouse approach to her job.

Then she throws in enough technology to make it possible to teach nine high school classes at once, and she instructs students in a school 35 miles away over a two-way video system.

By Brenda Wade Schmidt, The (Sioux Falls) Argus Leader

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2004-11-28-mohling-usat_x.htm

Mohling, 53, brings career and technical courses to students in this remote prairie town of 1,000 through a Technology for Tomorrow lab she started four years ago.

She says her goal was to give options to her students, most of whom are bused in from an 850-square-mile district that takes in parts of six counties.

"This is rural America, and my concern was, ‘Why can’t the students in my small school district have all the opportunities of students in a large school district?’ " she says. "If you look at the traditional six to eight periods a day … they couldn’t."

Mohling, who has taught at the Wessington Springs School District her entire 28-year career, traded her one-subject-per-period classroom for a wireless computer lab offering self-paced instruction. Students come in, grab a laptop and get to work on one of the nine technology or six consumer science courses she designed, as diverse as desktop publishing, computer animation and parenting.

As students work on assignments and turn them in to electronic folders, Mohling answers questions or prods students to discover the answer themselves. When they can demonstrate what they’ve learned, she knows they understand. If they don’t do their work, they get an incomplete.

"I truly like teaching this way," she says. The lab puts students in charge of their own learning.

"It’s all independent. You work at your own pace," says Clay Wenzel, 18, who has taken at least 10 of Mohling’s courses. Wenzel plans to pursue a technical education career before coming back to work on his family’s farm. He plans to use the advanced Web page design classes to help him through technical college and to allow him to start a Web site for show cattle. He has no problem staying engaged: "It’s stuff you like to do."

Over the past decade, Mohling has written or co-written $140,000 worth of grants to write curriculum and bring technology to this school of 111 students. During the course of their high school careers, nearly every student takes at least one of her classes, says principal and superintendent Darold Rounds. And the courses aren’t considered just an easy grade.

"She has a high standard," he says. "She doesn’t lower the bar just because some kid has problems." Instead, she finds a different approach to help a struggling student. When students come home from college, they consistently say Mohling went a long way toward preparing them for higher education, Rounds says.

Mohling also works part time for the Dial Virtual School, which has 406 students in 29 districts. This year she is teaching a pilot class on leadership; the goal is to make it a first-year class for the virtual school’s career and technology education curriculum, says John Heemstra, director of the virtual school. Instead of gauging student learning through face-to-face questions, Mohling uses other mechanisms such as hands-on projects, Heemstra says.

Teaching via distance-learning systems takes a combination of technical, people and teaching skills, he says. "There will be a growing need for teachers like her."

Mohling also links her students to their community, which is surrounded by farms and ranches. Students have designed Web sites for local groups, produced brochures and done radio news. Wessington Springs Area Development coordinator Lynda Luymes says Mohling’s community projects give the students a sense of belonging.

"We’re really working on trying to link the school and community together now more than we ever have," Luymes says.

By connecting students to the community by building technology skills, Mohling gives students options that were not available to her. She pursued teaching when her grandmother offered to pay for college and suggested she’d make a fine home economics teacher. That was back when the curriculum included sewing, baking and homemaking.

"I’m giving my students career options I never had, because I never had any career planning," Mohling says. "Thank goodness I enjoyed the job."