ORONO — For more than a decade, Maine-based nonprofit Rural Aspirations Project has worked with schools across the state with a simple goal in mind: To expand educational opportunities that inspire students and strengthen rural communities.
In a recent research article, University of Maine associate professor of educational leadership Catharine Biddle evaluated the organization’s support for Maine schools, showing how its approach of responsive professional development for teachers and other educators could serve as a model of care and mutuality that could be replicated in other rural areas.
“The modern school system isn’t really designed with rural schools in mind,” Biddle said. “Rural Aspirations Project is one of a handful of organizations that are leading the conversation about what effective rural school redesign looks like in practice.”
Korah Soll, the organization’s executive director and co-founder, said they do this by taking a human-centered design approach that starts with getting to the heart of the challenges that educators, students and other school stakeholders want to solve together and helping them land on solutions that are sustainable and within their capacity to achieve.
“We take what we call an inside-out approach, where ultimately the thing we do is provide a process time, and a commitment to the school to be able to work through their challenges,” Soll said.
“We have tons and tons of resources, thousands of pages of documents and templates,” she added. “But we almost always design new for every school, because there’s something unique about their approach or something unique about the way they want their solution to look. So we design in response to what the school wants or needs from the process, and when they get stuck, we help them move through the messiness.”
Biddle’s study, “Rural School Redesign: Enacting Care and Mutuality Through Responsive Professional Development,” was published in The Rural Educator, the journal of the National Rural Education Association.
Soll said the Rural Aspirations Project has consulted with more than 50 schools and districts across the state since 2014, estimating that their work has impacted the lives of thousands of teachers, administrators, students and other community members.
For the most part, Soll said the Rural Aspirations Project has long-term relationships with schools and districts. The services they provide range from helping develop a whole-school vision, redesign or strategic planning to program development to individual coaching with teachers, “and everything in between.”
A common thread in all of their work is curriculum — the teaching and learning that happens in classrooms. For many schools, the Rural Aspirations Project serves as a de facto curriculum coordinator.
“We help them develop systems and structures and professional development to support teachers as they write and create and realign their curriculum,” Soll said. “We also hold onto a lot of documents for schools. So when a school hires a new science teacher, they’ll reach out and say, ‘Do you have the scope and sequence for 7th grade science?’ Which leads to another conversation: ‘Can you come work with this teacher to help them better understand the curriculum?’ That work often leads to another body of work with the school.”
The human-centered design approach that Rural Aspirations Project employs has been adopted in fields such as computing, business and engineering as a way to ensure that a human perspective is considered at every step of the problem-solving process for those who are designing products, services or systems.
Biddle said its use in education is innovative, especially when it comes to thinking through how to solve the systemic challenges facing rural schools, from limited funding and economic opportunities to the so-called brain drain faced by many rural places.
“The way they position teachers as knowledgeable professionals, the way they give students a voice in the shaping the vision of their school, it creates a very sustainable model, where there are schools that have been working with Rural Aspirations for more than a decade, and the work keeps building on itself,” Biddle said.
Biddle leads the UMaine College of Education and Human Development’s Rural Thrive project. It provides ongoing professional development, mentorship and other evidence-based support to rural educators in Maine with the goal of leading to better resilience and retention among rural teachers and administrators, as well as improving student outcomes.
Rural Thrive launched in 2024 with a $3.3 million Congressionally Directed Spending award secured by U.S. Sens. Susan Collins and Angus King. Soll has worked as an adjunct instructor with educators who are taking courses at UMaine while participating in the project.