Immersive Learning, Tight-Knit Community Part of Centennial School’s 60 Years

Walking into Centennial’s ILC, students enter a room where three of the four surrounding walls are capable of displaying video, still photos or a combination to fully immerse and better understand a topic they may have never been exposed to previously. Whether investigating the center of an active volcano or soaring through the asteroid belt to explore the depths of space, educators in the room are able to bridge comprehension gaps for students, regardless of the subject content.

In its fourth year of operation, the ILC has supported numerous projects, including “Open Doors to the Arts,” in which a team of undergraduate students captured 360-degree digital content from several art galleries including Lehigh University Art Galleries to teach Centennial students how to interact with art.

The school strives to be innovative in numerous areas, including behaviorally, in academic progress for students with disabilities and, as the ILC is evidence of, in technology, according to Julie Fogt, who has been director of Centennial School for the past eight years.

Fogt said the school has conducted Individualized Education Program (IEP) meetings in the ILC using one wall to project the IEP draft while the other two walls display student performance data, samples of student work, and videos of student engagement.

When Lia Sandilos, associate professor of school psychology in Lehigh’s College of Education, started at the university in 2022, she was invited, along with other new faculty, to tour Centennial School. She said she was impressed with the high-quality practices they promote, specifically the positive behavioral supports they put in place for kids, and the hands-on training opportunities in which teachers actively engage.

Centennial is a perfect partner for Sandilos, as her research focuses mainly on two areas: creating a more welcoming and supportive classroom environment, specifically through the interactions and relationships between teachers and students, and the social and emotional well-being of students and teachers.

But what really fascinated Sandilos was the ILC. She said she had never seen anything like it. That’s likely because, according to Fogt, Centennial is the first school on the East Coast to use such technology, which she said was more commonly used in the business sector.

Zilong Pan, assistant professor of teaching, learning and technology, was on the tour with Sandilos as another new faculty member at the time. The two had conversations and began to work together, blending their areas of expertise—Pan’s in educational technology and academics and Sandilos’ in the social-emotional space. Born was a research project, ImmersED, by the two College of Education faculty members featuring Centennial’s ILC.

“We saw an opportunity to develop modules that integrate academics and social-emotional learning for this novel technology space,” Sandilos said. “We started off with a very small team of undergrads, whom we connected with through the Lehigh Valley Social Impact Fellowship program. And from scratch, our team started developing ideas, slowly creating video content and then what we call static slides that can be used in the room.”

The team expanded, adding two doctoral students, and they also received a faculty innovation grant that helped move their work forward.

They have already developed one module for the ILC, which is focused on the water cycle and integrates science and social-emotional learning. It contains a mindfulness activity as well as a yoga activity that reflect phases of the water cycle. A GoPro camera was used to take videos around the Lehigh Valley that help capture aspects of the water cycle, ranging from a sink inside Centennial School to the Lehigh River.

That module is in the data collection phase with the team receiving feedback from Centennial teachers as to what will work for the students and what they recommend changing. Once they have a template finalized, the plan is to expand to other content areas, such as English Language Arts and social studies. Other ideas Sandilos and Pan have considered include astronomy and using literature Centennial students are already reading to link the text to character perspectives, practicing empathy or thinking about emotions. Sandilos said they possibly could expand the use into community schools, such as in the Bethlehem Area School District, which has an ILC.

ImmersED, using the ILC, is just one example of ways Centennial School partners and supports research, both at Lehigh and to the outside education community.

A number of Centennial faculty members also present their own research at national and international conferences each year, according to Fogt. And currently, there are four staff members at the school who are affiliated faculty members in the College of Education and publish their own research papers.

Fogt is currently on four dissertation committees, which is another way the school assists with research.

“In the last two years, three doctoral-level students completed their dissertations through data collection here at the school,” Fogt said. “They conducted their studies at the school, so the school itself values research and helps support Lehigh students who are working to complete their degrees. And we work with professors.”

Centennial began as a more typical K-12 school for children of faculty members but pivoted to work with students with learning challenges and eventually the population it currently serves, students with autism and emotional disturbance. The pivot predates federal legislation supporting students with disabilities, which displayed Lehigh’s forward thinking, something that amazed Fogt.

“It's a pretty dynamic partnership,” said Fogt, who is starting her 30th year at Centennial, beginning as a school psychologist and serving as associate director prior to her current position. “It requires a lot of trust on both parts, but it's worked well for six decades, and it allows us to train exceptionally qualified individuals to work with the students with challenging needs. And it benefits the state in that there are many more well-qualified teachers to enter the profession of special education.”

The ILC is another example of that forward thinking that has helped Centennial School meet the needs of its students while also preparing educators, whether that is for their time at Centennial School or their future career elsewhere.

“They learn skills that they wouldn't otherwise learn if they were to enter the profession of teaching right away,” Fogt said. “They learn how to design really complicated and effective interventions for kids. They learn how to be outstanding colleagues, to use positive practices— not only with students, but with their colleagues, to troubleshoot and use conflict resolution in ways that resolve issues in productive ways.”

Fogt said that’s not always the case at other schools and the support and feedback teachers receive is part of what sets Centennial apart.

“They get a lot of dense mentoring from veteran teachers, from the supervisors here, and delivered in a very caring manner,” Fogt said. “They know they'll never have an experience where they receive this level of support, help and assistance—and in such a positive way—ever again. I tell them, ‘Go out in the field and what you've learned here, do that. Model that for other people. Be the person who leads those initiatives and has very positive and productive working relationships.’”

Fogt stressed that the staff believes in the “nice matters” mantra and displays the motivation to collaborate. She admitted she doesn’t always have all the answers, but by collaborating with her colleagues, the workload is more evenly distributed and the end result is better for the students as well.

“It's the idea that many hands make light work and that’s something that we firmly believe in,” Fogt said.

Sandilos said she has noticed the tight-knit community through online courses she teaches for Lehigh’s social, emotional and behavioral wellness certificate. Centennial teachers are often students in her class. In reading the teachers’ written work and engaging with them in class, Sandilos said she can see how much they learn from teaching at Centennial, and she can sense the positive support structures within the school—both in how teachers assist students with disabilities and in the collaborative support they receive from one another.

She also experienced the school’s tight-knit reputation through her ImmersED research project, and getting to know educators at Centennial.

“We really see that, especially when we were getting feedback from teachers on our modules—how well they know their students and how much they care about the instructional content that they provide,” Sandilos said. “They’re very committed to supporting students’ learning and their social-emotional skills.”

Additionally, Sandilos said she has witnessed it in the students who do practicum—hands-on learning experiences at Lehigh—through Lehigh’s school psychology program. After her students spend a year at Centennial, she said she sees how committed they are to the school and the mission, and how much they’ve grown as school psychologists.