The IDEA Blog
What Teachers Can Learn from Caine’s Arcade: Part 1
Back to that standing O. I was sitting among 200 other educators at LearnZillion’s TeachFest. When the company’s co-founder Eric Westendorf opened the morning session by showing this film, laughter and sniffles spread throughout the room. We teachers were struck by the seemingly simple truths Caine’s story revealed about how we learn. We learn when we are self-motivated. We learn when we are doing something we love. In awe of Caine, we sat quietly as the lights in the hotel ballroom flickered back on.
Mission Hill Ch. 9: Making the Journey to Authentic Assessment
In Chapter 9 of A Year at Mission Hill, we get a window into what assessment looks like when teachers and leaders recognize that the best way to measure a student’s progress requires more than a standardized exam, when they step beyond the “narrow measures of success” used in our current educational policies. What seems intuitive in theory - what educator would disagree that this is the case? - can seem overwhelming in the face of intense district, state, and federal pressure to raise test scores.
Salem Avenue Elementary School in Hagerstown, Maryland, is one school that has committed to “sitting beside” students in an effort to accurately assess what they know and can do. I recently spoke with Mary Helen Spiri, Executive Director of the Chesapeake Coalition of Essential Schools and school coach at Salem Ave about her work- a process she describes as “Helping the faculty to shape a planning process that back-maps from standards, enduring understandings and big ideas from the end of the year when exhibitions happen, back to the beginning of the year.”
The process began nine years ago, when the faculty and staff agreed to join the Coalition of Essential Schools and work with Dr. Spiri in an effort to increase student success. By examining classroom practice, school culture, and relationships between the community, school, and families, the school community as a whole was able to progress towards more authentic assessment...
Wrap of Mission Hill Chapter 8 - The World of Work
As you watch both videos, consider the quality of the work Mission Hill's 8th graders and Mundo Verde's Kindergartners are able to produce. In schools like these, there's no doubt about what matters most - nor is there any confusion over what high-quality student work actually looks like, and requires. But if there was any doubt remaining about why that's the right goal to have, Mission Hill's 8th graders are there to remind us, courtesy of the title they chose for their book: A Place for Me In The World.
My writing in connection with A Year at Mission Hill has grown from my belief that the specific strengths of Mission Hill can be found in schools all over the country lest the viewer believe that personalized, student-centered, caring learning environments exist only in the halls of one school. In looking for schools that introduce students to the world of work, as we see in Chapter 8, I found that most of the teachers I talked with acknowledged that this was an important piece in a child’s education while also recognizing that the barriers to doing it well were plentiful and hard to overcome.
Mission Hill Chapter 8: “Locked In” to Learning
Bishop Brady High School in Concord, New Hampshire has chosen to overcome those barriers by focusing not only on the careers that students may someday hold, but on the overarching skills and dispositions that their students will need in the world of work, no matter what their future vocations may be. ““We have an annual Career day where underclassmen visit with professionals in a variety of careers, asking questions and getting advice on coursework and college majors to enter the profession,” says Trevor Bonat, Principal. “In whatever field students choose, their work ethic, ability to work with a team and demeanor will determine how successful they are. It is critical to nurture both creativity AND discipline to prepare students for the workplace of 2018 – 2050,” says Trevor Bonat, This aligns nicely with Mission Hill’s goal of...
Seeing, Learning, and Healing in Oregon
Positive Spaces for Engaging Young People’s Voice
A version of this post was originally published at the Cooperative Catalyst
On Thursday a video of student Jeff Bliss, a sophomore at Duncanville High School in Texas, went viral in hours. In the video below we are privy to Bliss passionately speaking his truth. He knows that learning is more than packets to fill out, more than passively fulfilling simple and mindless tasks.
You want kids to come into your class, you want them to get excited for this? You gotta come in here, you gotta make them excited. You want a kid to change and start doing better? You gotta touch his frickin' heart. Can't expect a kid to change if all you do is just tell him," he says, as the teacher repeatedly tells him to leave the class.
While his message was pointed toward his experience in this classroom, it was born from a feeling that is boiling up in classroom after classroom across the country. It is why students are standing up and walking out of schools, protesting because they know there are better ways to learn together. They know they learn best when they are able to learn with teachers that teach to their hearts and not just to the test.
Students are not alone in this feeling, teachers and community leaders are also standing up and walking out. It is important to remember that we should not watch this video as an attack on teachers, but instead an opportunity to talk about what we want in our schools.
What struck me most about the video is that Jeff Bliss felt he needed to voice his ideas in a way that would get him kicked out of class. Why is this the only way for him to voice his visions about learning and education? Why did it take a 90 second video for us to realized that students "get it"? Why do we wait for students to burst or break before we listen?
Many of us are not waiting for students to reach a breaking point, we are proactively engaging them by providing positive venues and space for them to express their ideas, stories and...
Wrap of Mission Hill Chapter 7 - Behind the Scenes
In a lot of other school settings, the speech therapist does one thing, the occupational therapist does another thing, the resource room teacher does another thing, and the teacher's doing a 4th thing, and the left hand never really knows what the right hand is doing. Here at Mission Hill everything is integrated.
As a teacher, especially as a young teacher, the instinct is - close the door and hope everyone thinks that everything's going reall well. And the reality is that you need support and you need help. With open doors, we're always saying those things to each other.
Anyone who works with children - in fact, anyone who works with human beings - will recognize the gift and burden that comes with helping another person weather the storm of growing up and finding a place in the world. For the students at Mission Hill and Marlboro Elementary there’s a community of adults standing by, ready to provide shelter from the storm.
New School in BC Aims to Impact the Education System
What if you could take all the elements that you think make up a good education and combine them into one school? What would you do differently? What would be the impact of these changes on students, families and communities?
These are exactly the questions that Jeff Hopkins has been addressing as he develops a brand new high school, the Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry (PSII), set to open in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada in September 2013. In opening the school, Hopkins hopes to make a difference in education that goes beyond the students who attend the school—his goal is to create a model of what public education could look like if organized differently, thereby contributing to systems transformation in the mainstream education system.
In contrast to a typical high school, PSII will have no classrooms, no subjects, and no groupings by age. Learning will be inquiry based and interdisciplinary. Teachers will not stand in front of a classroom and lecture, but rather will work with students in a coaching relationship to help them co-create a learning path that meets required learning outcomes, but is also personalized according to their interests and passions. Education at PSII will not occur in silos: there will be opportunities for social and collaborative learning within the school, and with...
Mission Hill School: An Alternative to “No Excuses”
This is a guest post by Matthew Knoester, a National Board Certified Teacher and former teacher at the Mission Hill School, and currently Assistant Professor of Education at the University of Evansville. Matthew recently wrote a book about the Mission Hill School, entitled Democratic Education in Practice: Inside the Mission Hill School (Teachers College Press, 2012) and edited a book called International Struggles for Critical Democratic Education (Peter Lang, 2012).
Mission Hill School founder Deborah Meier has authored a column, or “blog debate,” on the website of Education Week since 2007. She began by debating Diane Ravitch, where they discussed a wide range of educational issues and where Ravitch surprised readers by agreeing with much of what Meier wrote. Since Ravitch left the sight to focus on her own excellent blog, Meier has interacted with an impressive list of educational thinkers, including Pedro A. Noguera, Alfie Kohn, Eric Hanushek, and, most recently, Elliot Witney, one of the first principals of a KIPP charter school.
One of the central issues discussed by Witney and Meier was the idea of “No excuses,” a common refrain among school leaders who claim to allow little room for students to make mistakes, academically or behaviorally. Meier argued that that is the wrong approach: “The term ‘no excuses’ bothers me the same way a whole host of other slogans harden our hearts and brains to the fact that there are ‘excuses.’ At its heart, our legal system rests on the demand that defendants have a right to present their ‘excuses’—to be heard.”
Meier noted that adults in fact “hear” and respond to students’ excuses, but differently, due to pre-conceived notions, as well as accepted forms of acting and communicating in schools. She continued, “I have experienced the sad fact that some folks learn to expect their right to be heard out—with their ‘excuses’—and some not. On the whole, it's partly because of their skill at making excuses and partly...
Mission Hill Chapter 7: Shelter from the Storm
This is a guest post by Laura Thomas, Director of the Antioch Center for School Renewal, the service division of Antioch University New England’s Education Department. Laura is currently involved in research around the experiences of students and educators in rural environments, particularly in the areas of social justice, problem based learning, and technology integration. The author of Facilitating Authentic Learning, (Corwin Press, 2012), she blogs at The Critical Skills Classroom and can be found on Twitter @CriticalSkills1
About two minutes into Chapter 7 of A Year at Mission Hill, we see a young student leaving his classroom, obviously frustrated and angry. An adult follows behind, aware and watchful and prepared to guide him through the emotional storm he’s obviously weathering. In the frames that precede and follow this moment, we get to see the ways that the Mission Hill community supports kids when they are at their growing edges - when they are frustrated, disengaged, unhappy and challenging. Francie Marbury, principal of Marlboro Elementary School in Marlboro, Vermont knows about the ubiquitous nature of that moment. “That student, very angry, running down the hall – that was familiar,” she notes. “And it’s so refreshing that the first thing mentioned in response isn't zero tolerance, planning rooms, or suspension.”
For the adults at MES, a K-8 school of nearly 90 students in Southeastern Vermont, supporting kids in their most challenging moments is a cornerstone of the educational experience. “We've modeled our approach on the 3 tiered system used in PBIS but not in a lock step way.” In both schools, every adult in the building can expect to play a role. Mission Hill secretary Jonie Davies comments that kids may come to her to “regroup, take a break…even just for a hug.” At MES, “the other intervention that is so based on community and relationship is just a visit to the secretary - often at the student's request.” So, even though we don't...
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