It's a question that has been asked for generations: “Why do you need geometry?”

“For life,” one student responded to the teacher's question in class Monday.

“But why?” she repeated.

“Like for construction,” the student said, and it was as if a little light had turned on in that Village Elementary fifth-grade classroom.

Students at Village and other Harding-area schools - Southwick Elementary, Prince Chapman Academy and Harding High - are learning new ways to “connect the dots” while their teachers are learning new ways to educate them.

A Learning Symposium was held Monday night to update the community on the success of the technique and to show its effectiveness to those who may not have seen it in the past.

The technique is credited with raising ISTEP scores by 5 percent in one fifth-grade classroom alone, and East Allen County Schools has high hopes that the program will continue to show benefits as it expands.

“We're excited about ISTEP in March,” said Jeanne Zehr, assistant superintendent of school management, adding even better results should come in 2011.

The technique started last year through the National Urban Alliance, which focuses on effective teachers.

“What everyone is recognizing is that the teacher is the single largest in-school factor that affects student achievement,” said Eric Cooper, NUA president.

Through various techniques, teachers learn how to look for a student's strengths and then build on them. He said weaknesses can be improved then by using those avenues.

Cooper said once a student learns how to think comprehensively, learning becomes natural.

A key example was ISTEP.

While a student may be taking an English/Language Arts test, the question may center around the arts or social studies even though the answer is about grammar. NUA stresses that students must be able to connect various subjects to effectively answer the question.

“Teachers have really become more focused in their lessons,” Zehr said.

The program, which has been used in Seattle, Minneapolis and Indianapolis, has drawn national attention. So much that people visited EACS to see what the fuss is all about.

To try to show what was going on, NUA, in partnership with the International Center for the Enhancement of Learning Potential, held the symposium.

The symposium gave an overview of the work done by NUA and then ICELP stepped in to do a demonstration of techniques only being used locally at Village Elementary.

The demonstration was just what was going on in a classroom earlier in the day. In Julie Smith's fifth-grade class, students were literally connecting the dots on their papers and then were asked to apply these techniques to other areas of study, ISTEP and finally how this could be used in life.

“Like in construction,” as one student said was the realization that geometry could be used in life. The technique claims to help children “create order and meaning from initially perceived disconnected and amorphous information,” according to paperwork handed out at the symposium.

Another technique has students defend their answers to fully explain the subject.

So far, only a few teachers are trained in this method at the targeted schools. Zehr hopes over time that will grow to include every teacher at those schools, and possibly the district.