Student involvement key to STEM learning and state recognition at Contentnea-Savannah K-8
By Patrick Holmes
October 31, 2025
At a school with nearly 800 students, from four-year-old preschoolers to 14-year-old middle-schoolers, learning can be loud and active. That’s exactly how teachers and staff at Contentnea-Savannah K-8 School want it.
“When you go through the halls, you see teachers that are up and active,” CSS principal Dr. Heather Walston said. “They’re not lecturing from notes. That’s not what learning looks like here. It sounds more like a construction zone than a church.”
The analogy is apt, considering that CSS is building a culture that prizes student engagement and inquiry-based learning, key elements in a paradigm shift that recently earned the school two significant honors: STEM School of Distinction recognition from the state – joining Northwest Elementary and EB Frink Middle on a list of 11 schools statewide – as well as STEM accreditation from the global education nonprofit Cognia.
At CSS, as with Lenoir County Public Schools at large, STEM has escaped the traditional confines of science, technology, engineering and math and is, instead, afoot wherever students become heavily involved in classroom instruction.
“My students are much more inclined to listen to each other than they are to listen to me,” said sixth-grade math teacher Carla Bachelor. “That’s just the nature of an adolescent.”
A veteran of 26 years in the classroom, all in middle school, Bachelor leverages that inclination, whether in a class “number talk” or by having students “teach” their own problem-solving process, to fuel a curriculum she describes as discovery-based and hands-on.
“We do a lot of sharing,” she said. “Instead of me standing up there and giving them 15 or 20 minutes of notes, they are doing the work. I’m just answering questions and making sure they are on the right track.”
The result? Students who are hesitant to leave her class when the bell rings.
“They are enjoying math. They are being successful. They are actually getting an understanding of what’s going on,” Bachelor said.
Bachelor and her colleagues got a major assist in employing this student-centric approach to learning when, this past summer, CSS was chosen as one of 15 middle schools in the state to participate in a five-year, $25 million project to boost math instruction and career development. The project, funded by a Golden Leaf Foundation grant, did not alter the curriculum as much as help galvanize teachers’ approach to it through numerous resources, including extensive teacher coaching.
These are seeds sown in fertile ground, according to Walston.
“We’ve talked about student engagement for so long,” the principal said. “That’s what STEM is now, strategies that engage minds. It’s become a mindset here. Our staff does a great job providing those different strategies for those kids. The staff is just great at meeting the children where they are.”
Kristin Taylor’s kindergarten students aren’t demystifying fractions or calculating ratios, but they are taking a role in their learning, putting their own creative stamp on lessons, talking about what they’re learning with their teacher and their classmates.
“When I think about STEM, I think about inquiry-based learning,” said Taylor, who’s taught for 12 years, nine of those at CSS. “In kindergarten, we use a lot of hands-on materials, we do a lot of small-group and partner work, we are always conversing.”
A math lesson, for instance, becomes a series of prompts, asking students to think through their answers.
“If they say they think there are eight ‘counters,’ I would ask them how they know and they explain their thoughts,” Taylor said. “I might ask what would happen if I take one away, instead of just saying eight take away one is seven.”
That approach prioritizes number sense over memorization.
“Students are actively constructing understanding through exploring and discussing instead of just receiving steps,” the teacher said.
The strategy of replacing simple recall with discovery applies across the board, from phonetics to writing to exploring the life cycle of a pumpkin. Learning phonics, students arrange magnetic letters to help them “map” sounds. Basic writing instruction has the class searching for and talking about basic patterns in the sentences they read, such as capitalization and punctuation.
“Students are helping lead the learning,” Taylor said. “They are super engaged because they are not just having to listen. They are participating in the conversation. They are adding to what I’m saying.”
In Bachelor’s math class, the students still have homework, they still do practice problems, they still take tests; but they also create structures that make geometry real, they get to show the teacher another way to find a solution, they turn a lesson on ratios into colored graphs. In short, Bachelor believes, they have fun. And so does she.
“I’m getting so much out of seeing these students learn,” she said. “At the end of the day, that’s what it’s all about. At the end of the day, it’s all about having those children be successful.”
Carla Bachelor, a sixth-grade math teacher at Contentnea-Savannah K-8 School, helps students work through a problem involving ratios.
Working in a small group, kindergarteners in Kristin Taylor’s class at Contentnea-Savannah K-8 School study the letter ‘c’ by drawing pictures that illustrate its sound.
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