Jill Gugisberg Wall is a retired Aerospace and Engineering Program Manager and teacher, and was one of the guiding forces behind the successful Farnsworth Aerospace Magnet School, a public school in Saint Paul, Minnesota. When the school was looking for a new magnet focus, , she and her family came up with the idea of Aerospace. Not only did the school succeed with the focus, they attracted the support of numerous astronauts and business and community partners. Her journey is inspiring, and one of immense impact.
Education Everywhere
My Mom and Dad were raised in small towns and were the first in their families to go to college. I had three brothers and no sisters, and grew up with education as a priority. I grew up with stories about the sacrifices they made in order to get room and board to go to college and get any money for tuition. I grew up knowing that education was important.
Dad worked in St. Paul schools for 33 years, mostly as a junior high principal. Mom was also in education: phy ed, then English. She worked until she had kids and then was a stay-at-home mother. In later years, she became a professional volunteer.
Our dinner table was a place of top world events, a lot of conversation, a lot of informal educating. I also would hear stories about education itself; Dad would have stories about junior high age kids. Later on, when I went to work at a junior high, I thought of Dad a lot because he absolutely loved junior high kids. He was really fascinated by them and enjoyed the relationships he built.
Dad was also a reservist in the military, one of my many ties to aerospace. He was a flight instructor in World War II, then became a reservist for 20 some years—Navy reserve. He would take his active duty during the summer and take the family with him. I have been to all 50 states. That was a gift. We’d tow along a small travel trailer and Dad would go to work every day, but he would plan it so that one year we went south, one year northeast, so we were seeing all these different parts of the country. That made me curious about cultures and places, similarities and differences. It showed me that education doesn’t just happen within school walls or a building. I talk about taking kids out to provide opportunities because I believe there are a lot of different ways and places to learn.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to go into education, to be a teacher. I did not like science, and I did not like math in high school; they were probably my worst subjects. I did well in school overall and graduated in 1975. It was a period when women were going into different things, but still a lot of people were saying that teaching was the traditional path for a woman. I was an independent kind of thinker and just didn’t see any obvious career choices.
Student and Teacher
My senior year in high school I had enough credits—we didn’t have a post-secondary enrollment option (PSEO)—so I told my parents I wanted to take a college course. I was very social and still wanted to be in high school band. I didn’t want to give that up my senior year; that was the fun part. But it was unheard of to take a college course. So, I said to my parents I’d just go three hours a day and be done. They said no, you have to have some other plans than just being done.
Half a day every day my senior year, I volunteered in two classrooms, second and third grade, at the elementary school I had attended. The teachers gave me meaningful things to do with the kids—putting on a play, doing costume things, having the kids do a book talk in costume, and so on. And I loved it. The kids were unique, all coming from different backgrounds, and had such neat gifts and talents. Yes, some were top students in math or another subject area, but some were really creative and imaginative thinkers. I really got to know them one on one, and decided then that I really wanted to go into elementary education. It was embedded in everything that was going on in my life at the time.
Key Influences
Religion and media did not play a big role in developing my early beliefs. I was born and raised Catholic, which has a certain value system. But I learned the most about religion when I went to Lutheran Bible camp with my friends. When I was growing up, we would read the paper every day and talk about current events, but I don’t think that played a major role.
Family was very important, including extended family. Dad’s cousin was also Mom’s professor at Mankato; she and Mom got to be friends before Mom and Dad met. She ended up moving to New Mexico for health reasons and taught for years at the University of New Mexico. I would go down summers as a high-schooler and stay with her. She was brilliant.
She would put me in charge of the Newman Club library and have me work in the stacks. I would go into my room and next to my bed she would have left a note that said something like “I’ve left a stack of books. Tomorrow we’ll be discussing ‘Death Comes to the Archbishop’ chapters one through five, so make sure you read that tonight before you go to sleep.”
She really opened up the whole southwest in history for me: she was brilliant. She got me thinking deep, probing questions. She was way ahead of her time. We would go trekking through the mountains to go trout fishing and things like that. She made me want to know more, to learn more, even outside school. I was learning immense amounts of things about people, about history, about myself. She was very influential.
Learning to Teach
My first year of college I went to Bemidji State University. My sophomore year I came to the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities. I had a phenomenal experience. The U was huge, but I was in a brand-new “block program” during my junior and senior years in education. Students were organized in blocks for our entire junior year. Subjects were, too: We had science, social studies and math together, then reading, writing, and language arts.
We were in methods classes all morning, five days a week. Sometimes the professors taught together integrating the subjects. Then, after the winter break, we were in different schools three days a week. We were having an immediate hands-on practicum experience, practicing what we had learned. My science professor was Roger Johnson. He and his brother were big on cooperative learning, which was really starting to become popular in education.
There were 30 of us in the block program, and we were each other’s support team. We did a lot of co-teaching. I learned early on the advantages of co-teaching along with integrated subjects. Those two things stood out in the block program.
I mentioned that I didn’t like science. The only class I ever got kicked out of was science because I was talking too much. I had grown up with science being you read a book and answer questions. That’s what it was. But when I went to college and had that integrated approach in the block program, I started to love science because I could see it as hands-on, and you could learn so many different things by being engaged in what you were doing.
That changed in my college experience and got me excited about science. I truly loved it. So that fits into aerospace and why that worked so well. I learned how to be creative. You can use aerospace and reading and writing and all the subjects and you can integrate it much like you can with science. And you can really get engaged because it’s hands-on, it’s teamwork and cooperative, and you’re doing it instead of just reading about it.
Lasting Relationships
A group from our block who graduated in 1979 still get together. We started immediately: five couples, six of whom were in the block together. We meet twice every year, once before workshop week in August and once at the holidays. We’ve seen each other through marriages, weddings, illnesses, parents dying, our children growing up. Now our group has added 16 (and counting) grandchildren to the group. We call them—U Group Generation 3! Our kids are friends who have grown up together. We all taught in different districts. I believe the opportunity we had to co-teach together and bond and support each other back then helped create these lasting relationships.
In the block program, we would student teach in blocks. Instead of each of us at different schools, nine of us were student teachers at one school. Our student teaching supervisor was on staff at that school. We met two mornings a week and had instant feedback on what we were doing in our lessons—not just from the supervisor but from our colleagues.
I loved my experience at the University of Minnesota, spending junior and senior year with those 30 people. It was a small enough group to be able to relate to. It was individualized and didn’t feel like a large school.
First Year Teaching
When I graduated, even before I was looking for a job, I had a college friend who went from Bemidji State to the University of North Dakota. UND ran a federal program that was an extension of Head Start, and they sent professors to the Zuni Indian reservation in New Mexico. My friend heard about this and invited me. Through phone interviews, we both got jobs there.
The teachers there were from all over the country; they had gone to different colleges and had different experiences. But we all lived together in “teacherage” housing and worked together, 50 miles from the nearest town. We had one radio station and no television. That was my first year of teaching: working together, helping each other out, learning from each other. We traveled together. We spent Thanksgiving in Mexico. It was a combination of friends, extended family and education.
Teaching and doing things outside my previous experience transformed my thinking. I had 19 kids and a full-time Zuni-speaking aid. I learned to listen, to appreciate the depth and richness of their culture, to meet the needs of each individual student. It was a phenomenal experience.
My time on the Zuni reservation convinced me that class size matters for everyone. I will argue class size until I’m blue in the face. I have taught as many as 37 students in one class, but that’s too many for me to get to know those kids and meet their needs in a way that I am satisfied.
Keep a Toe In
Another leadership development experience was when I directed a horseback riding program. It was something I had grown up with at camp, and it was really important to me as a way of developing skills. Eventually I became director of the riding program. I was told the program would be cut completely unless I brought in a certain dollar figure.
I wasn’t going to let the riding camp be cut. Making that amount was going to be impossible with the riders I had from camp, so I had to do something different. Which I did. I ended up promoting everything in the town, offering rides for the townspeople so I could keep the program. Some people say, “Step outside the box,” but I say “Keep a toe in.”
“There’s nothing here”
Here was another incredible education experience. When I got to Farnsworth, the building had been shut down for eight years. They needed the space again, so it was reopened in 1990. When we started the first day, there wasn’t a desk, a chair, a book—nothing was left in that school. We had no idea how many kids were going to show up on the first day. The staff had all signed on to this, with a leader we all believed in.
I was on leave with two children. I had no intention of going back to work until Eric, my youngest, was five. He was two. And this former principal called and asked me to lunch. I had worked with him earlier in St. Paul. My husband, John, was moving to Farnsworth. It didn’t click with me what he wanted. He said, “I want you to come back and start the science program at Farnsworth. I think you’d be great. There’s nothing here. You don’t have anything.”
I went back because I thought this principal would be supportive in anything that I tried. I knew you could teach science with not much. I like taking on challenges and making things happen. I’m a doer, and I knew I would be asked to do a lot of doin’ to make this go. So, this group of teachers, one person per grade level, started with nothing. I had a Cub box that I would put stuff in to carry to class. I went back off leave for this. My husband was teaching there as well.
It was a super connected staff. Within a year we had written a grant to be an outcome-based education (OBE) magnet school, because we knew that could help us raise money for programs. In 1990, OBE was huge in Rochester before there were national standards. So, we set and wrote standards for everything. Then we got an addition to our building. I had this new science room and thousands of dollars to spend to make it what it should be. We built from a foundation of community and parents.
Why Farnsworth?
But all of a sudden everybody had standards, so why would you choose to go to Farnsworth? We needed to come up with something. We had parent focus groups. We had a magnet school committee, and people brought up ideas like service learning and partnerships, but for a magnet school to be successful you need a theme that will work for all grade levels in all subject areas. You need to have a topic that’s exciting for students. You need to have a way to involve families and a way to create partnerships around the focus. Well, nothing was really coming up as an idea.
Back to the dinner table and the importance of family discussions. We did this when I was a kid, and we did this with our kids as well. They had been hearing our conversations about what to do at Farnsworth. They also knew my dad and Grandpa once took us to the air show in Oshkosh. In science I always used aerospace and flight and space to teach science because kids got really excited about it. We did family things around air shows. Our oldest son said, “You guys should be an aerospace school. That would be really cool. Kids would like that.”
“Hmm,” I said. “That’s kind of interesting.”
Most everybody knows the dinner-table story, but not many know what came next. John and I sat down that night and wrote a two-page plan. We outlined why it was such a great idea, described how we could do things in each of five areas, mentioned possible partnerships, made lists of ways we could integrate subjects, and brainstormed how to cover every grade level and how to involve families. That was our strategic plan.
We were pretty excited. We took it to the principal, Dr. Troy Vincent, the next day and he looked at the outline. He knew nothing about aerospace as a subject, and said “Well, I don’t know. Let me just think about this a little bit. But I never say no.” We left it with him. The next day he was going 110 miles per hour.
It only took a day for him to see all the possibilities. He thought the idea was great. He called a staff meeting and then the process started. I believe that when he looked at it and thought for a longer period of time, he saw why we were so excited about it. You couldn’t have another magnet school like somebody else. It was unique, it was creative, it met all those criteria.
Leadership Qualities
Different leaders have important qualities of all sorts. Being supportive, being committed, future thinking, inspiring others, developing confidence. One of my favorite leaders is Eleanor Roosevelt because she was so forward-thinking. She went against what her role was supposed to be—the hostess for her husband.
She held an important role in developing the human rights platform for the United Nations, and when it was passed, she received a standing ovation from the members. When I was awarded an Eleanor Roosevelt Teacher Fellowship, I had known some things about her. But then I learned a lot more. Her sense of equity and human rights was strong. The issues of equality keep coming back to me.
Make It Meaningful
I did not go after my master’s degree right away like the rest of my friends; I got laid off. Every year in May for the first six years I got a pink slip. I have great empathy with new teachers who go through that. It really held me from going back for my master’s. In retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t go right back to school. When I did, I really shopped around for something meaningful. I chose Hamline University and was the first graduate of their new master’s in education program. I was pretty much able to write my own master’s program. And it was meaningful for me.
As a girl, I didn’t think I was interested in science, but really, I was. For example, my experience horseback riding inspired me to study animal science. By the 1990s, I wanted to get more girls involved in science. It was important to create my own program and help get girls interested in science and engineering.
For my master’s, I created a program with 50 girls, a science encouragement program. This was my thesis project. I had three schools, fifth and sixth graders. I was involved with AAUW (American Association of University Women). I matched up two girls to a woman mentor. These women were all different ages—phenomenal, interesting women that really believed in this need for encouragement as well. The mentors’ role was not to say, “You have to do this and this and this,” but rather ask the students to share their ideas and then be supportive advisors.
There were two parts to the program. One was an all-day science course with scientists from corporations like 3M and Medtronic who came in. The students went to different workshops all day with their mentors and had lunch together. Two weeks later we had an event at the Science Museum for the girls, plus their parents and families. I have always believed in having parents involved with their kids’ education, doing things together. We got companies to sponsor family memberships for the evening. That was supposed to be it. Well, of course the girls had my info so they were calling and asking, “When can we get together again?” Because they had bonded through these two experiences.
The mentors were able to meet the parents and anything after that would be the mentors and the girls doing things on their own. From three elementary schools, the girls then went to 13 middle schools, so logistics became interesting. We went on camping weekends, we had dinners, I rented a camp, we did all sorts of things. The group kept getting smaller, but some of the girls and mentors established relationships all the way through high school and college. I know some that went to their mentees’ college graduation. One of the girls ended up student teaching for me. That whole program was the basis for my master’s work.
I was also involved with Camp Fire Girls. My brothers were in Boy Scouts; Mom was the leader of the Camp Fire group. That group forged friendships that continue to this day. I took on roles with Camp Fire at the city level, zone level and national level—to the point that when I was a high school senior, I would fly around and speak to groups of adults in support of a capital campaign. Traveling and speaking to different groups helped me develop confidence and skill. For some roles I was elected; for the capital campaign I was selected.
Leadership Can Be Learned
On reflection, I was always a doer, a gatherer of people who always wanted to empower others. I was the idea person, always kind of visionary: “Let’s try this; let’s try that.” Some of those things just came naturally; I was willing to try things. And I always worked hard. I would put in a lot of time for those things. Of course, I had help developing some of those leadership skills from the people around me. Mom was a professional volunteer. At Camp Fire, she went through different levels and served on the national board. At AAUW she was president. She was always very giving in her volunteer roles.
Some skills have to be developed; I think you have to build leaders. I had a Camp Fire group of phenomenal girls; they would speak, they would do, and they would build skills and abilities. Being empowered to make decisions gave them opportunities to develop, to build self-confidence. When they were seniors, they all wrote me a note saying I believed in them and what they could do.
Changes and Challenges
The part of the teaching environment that has changed, and has been very difficult for me to watch, is education based on standardized tests. I believe it takes creativity and opportunity away from the students, teachers, everybody. One of the super exciting things about the aerospace program is watching what the staff can do. When we first started, there were no other schools doing what we did. We had to form a team and worked hard to get the job done.
Right before I retired, I convened a meeting of my staff to re-look at the aerospace curriculum and our continuous improvement. What I said was, that from the beginning, I did a ton of legwork, but then I called in a lot of other staff people. They were the creative force that made this happen. They were incredible. Working with that team again for a week reminded me of the amazing curriculum a group could come up with together.
Things change in 10 years—technology, integrated learning which we had done, but now with more constraints, like everybody in the district will be on this page at this time. I think part of what builds students as really good people is that individuality, that taking the time to get to know the kids, the kids to know me and each other. I used to do a thing in the classroom that, for an hour and a half on Friday afternoon, we would have “Friday Fun” and play board games or learn new strategy games. I would team different kids with each other and do all sorts of things that were really rich learning experiences, but not on standardized tests. I think there are so many qualitative things that are so important, caring for individual human beings, that’s not testable with a standardized test.
Do I care that a kid looks at a picture or figures out what the thermometer is, or do I care if a kid takes a thermometer, puts it in the water, watches it, makes predictions about what’s going to happen? I care less about the ABCD than I do about the action. Because that’s where the learning is.
To free up the staff to be creative, you have to actively listen and challenge people. Whether it was the girls I was working with in Camp Fire, or the staff, you have to build that confidence. By giving them challenges, and then really applauding what they’re doing and helping them along the way, asking probing questions to get them to expand their ideas, they discover new possibilities.
Creating community has always been important to me. What became difficult for me was that there was less time for informal interaction with the staff. We used to do a lot of social things. Now some of the staff are so busy getting data in that they don’t even eat lunch anymore. There is less informal time, and more time on meeting standard 62a or whatever, always analyzing data. To some degree that’s important, but I think at the expense of being able to learn more about each other, their families, where they grew up that you get with informal exchange. In all those different programs—Zuni, block program, etc.—helping each other out and building together is valuable.
Education Is Relationships
I think one of my gifts in the classroom was really getting to know the individuals. I was at dinner and a parent of a student that I had for two years told me she remembered me because “You came to hockey games, and you did this and that.” They didn’t remember if I taught him how to multiply, which I probably did, but they remembered all these other things. They remembered the individual, personal things. I introduced different things, like if it was national sandwich day, we’re going to have sub sandwiches. On pi day (3/14), we had pie. We always tried to create that community.
I grew up believing I can. If you see it, if you are a visionary for something, you can do it. At first when we got into the aerospace program, in the planning stage, I got challenged with the argument that none of it was standards-based. So, I said “I can give you any one of these things and give you standards for it.” Aerospace can be integrated into reading, writing, math, history—and all can be based on the standards.
To me, teaching is like being given a gift to be able to be with kids, and I look at it as more than just the kids; it’s the parents and the families. And the other staff. Share with the others. Being with your colleagues is more than just work. I have learned so much from other people.
My advice for new teachers is simple: Be committed to your career. Be committed to your growth as a person; you’re going to learn from others. Be willing to take risks and think outside the box while keeping a toe in. Listen, communicate, and believe in yourself. Make others part of the process, give them ownership. Support the staff in being creative and guide them in problem solving. Make everybody part of that process.