Posted on Jun 18, 2010 - 11:42 AM by Alison Bagg Brink in ImprovEducation
The last meeting of the year is just winding down, the walls of the classroom are bare, and there is not a single piece of paper on the floor. It is officially time to start summer, at least for me.Posted on Jun 16, 2010 - 05:53 PM by Luis Moreno in Crazy Quilt
Spanish, like every other major language, is indeed a crazy quilt of various dialects as there arePosted on Jun 15, 2010 - 10:25 PM by Ammerah Saidi in The Learning Curve
School has been out for a weekend now and as soon as the last bell of the school year rang, a couple of my friends and some of my students got right to work on our presentation for the U.S. Social Forum. Our presentation is called "Urban School Awakening: Critical Elements of Urban School Reform."Posted on Jun 10, 2010 - 09:06 AM by Kristan Morrison in democracy.edu
I am teaching two summer classes this year (my "summer vacation, ahhhh" was actually just for one week!) and in one of them we have been talking a lot lately about free schools. Of the 18 students in my class, I would say that about 75 percent of them reacted extremely negatively to the idea that kids should have freedom to learn what they wish, how they wish, and when they wish. Now, my students are definitely not in favor of our current conventional, very constrained system of education, but they seemed pretty appalled by the level of freedom that kids have at places like Summerhill, the Albany Free School, and the Sudbury Valley School. The most oft-cited opposition to these schools... What’s up with June anyway?Posted on Jun 09, 2010 - 10:35 AM by Jonah Canner in Got Questions?
Question: According to the calendar there are still two and a half weeks of school left, but according to my students school ended the second the temperature in my classroom reached 90 degrees two weeks ago. I'm usually a laid back teacher who has a very good relationship with her students but at the end of the year they start bouncing off the wall and reverting to behaviors they haven't shown in months. Is there anything I can do about this or should I just suck it up and pray that nothing goes terribly wrong over the next two weeks?Posted on Jun 07, 2010 - 10:26 AM by Dana Bennis in The Landscape
I enjoy reading columns by David Brooks in The New York Times. He's a moderate conservative who promotes a more compassionate, intellectual, and pragmatic form of conservatism than what is often found in politics and the media. Nonetheless, I often disagree with him, and his recent op-ed on education deserves a critical response.Posted on May 27, 2010 - 12:17 PM by Kristan Morrison in democracy.edu
When I am discussing with others my thoughts about how our conventional education system should change, I am sometimes asked, in exasperation, if there Is anything about our existing approach to education that I do agree with. This past week, I have re-encountered one thing that I really do love about schools and their traditions -- and that is the rhythms of the academic year. Work, work, work, break; work, work, work (thinking about break), break. Right now I am in a break between the spring semester and the summer and am fully enjoying it. I just love summer time (not because of the heat, mind you!) and even though I am working and teaching throughout the summer, there's just... Improv…with DramaPosted on May 11, 2010 - 08:41 PM by Tim Curley in ImprovEducation
As we all know, one of the casualties of a standards-based curriculum, where THE TEST is the driving force, is the loss of teaching the arts. Performing arts are particularly hard hit. At El Verano School, we are doing what we can to lessen the hit that drama classes have taken.Posted on Apr 29, 2010 - 10:02 PM by Alison Bagg Brink in ImprovEducation
Students began choosing the delivery method for new information at the beginning of the month. I discussed this in "Maybe Kids Should Have a Say in How They Receive Information?"Posted on Apr 18, 2010 - 10:35 PM by Ammerah Saidi in The Learning Curve
You know that line we say when someone goes overboard: "He threw in everything but the kitchen sink." Well, some boys at my school wanted to make sure to include the sink into whatever they were mixing because they ripped it out of the wall in one of their bathrooms.Posted on Apr 12, 2010 - 09:31 AM by Kristan Morrison in democracy.edu
My graduate students tell me that I am depressing them - that I am the unfunny version of Saturday Night Live's Debbie Downer . Well, they didn't actually call me that, but that's sometimes how I feel. I teach the foundations of education course at my university. This is the class where American education is looked at through a critical lens - comparing the historical, Jeffersonian democratic citizenship purpose of education to the social mobility purposes that seem most paramount in schools today. We explore and critique different philosophies of education, deconstruct our society's current politicization of education, examine the injustices of our education system's funding practices,... Maybe Kids Should Have a Say in How They Receive Information?Posted on Apr 08, 2010 - 10:46 PM by Alison Bagg Brink in ImprovEducation
How much control should students have in a classroom?Posted on Mar 25, 2010 - 04:30 PM by Alison Bagg Brink in Uncharted Parenting
Spring Break.Posted on Mar 17, 2010 - 09:01 PM by Ammerah Saidi in The Learning Curve
Paul, one of my friends in high school, proclaimed that North Dakota didn't exist. He'd ask, "Have you ever met anyone from North Dakota? What's ever come out of North Dakota? We've read about it--but have you ever been there?" I've never really stopped wondering about North Dakota being a conspiracy to validate South Dakota's existence, but Paul's words have been louder than ever in my head since I've taken on my new teaching job as a literacy intervention teacher.Posted on Mar 17, 2010 - 06:50 PM by Sara Schmidt in Uncharted Parenting
One of the things that really made me want to make sure my daughter's education was different from my own was the view of another nation's school system I had a chance to experience during college. During my sophomore year, I was able to participate in a teaching internship in Spain for at-risk children; I consider it one of the best learning experiences of my life yet.Posted on Mar 10, 2010 - 11:06 PM by Alison Bagg Brink in ImprovEducation
Spring has arrived... if not in weather, in attitude.Posted on Mar 01, 2010 - 04:42 PM by Shawn Strader in Op-Education
I live in a pretty relaxed neighborhood in Tempe, AZ. For most of the houses throughout my neighborhood, to walk out the back yard and into the alley is to come face to face with someone else's backyard, or usually their 6-foot cinder-block wall. Past my back gate, however, is the school yard of a middle school. The yard is used for Physical Education, and recess at lunch, mainly.Posted on Feb 24, 2010 - 02:46 PM by Jonah Canner in Got Questions?
I used to direct an after-school program, which was housed in a public school classroom, and I tried to implement a democratic meeting with my middle school students (a diverse group in terms of race and family income). As well-intentioned as I was, the students didn't respect me as a leader because I was offering them decision-making power. They seemed so used to an authoritarian school day that they didn't know what to do with an unexpected dose of freedom. It was also just a drop in the bucket compared to the way they spent the majority of their time. How would you have handled this situation?Posted on Feb 23, 2010 - 11:40 PM by Alison Bagg Brink in ImprovEducation
It has been a strange week at the Brink house. It all culminated yesterday morning, when my husband drove to a job site early, to pick up some tools. Yesterday was crystal clear. He was on a stretch of road with a 35 mile an hour speed limit. The car in front of my husband's van struck a man walking across the street. The walker was tossed into the air, hit the pavement, and rolled multiple times. The driver of the car barely slowed down, and then fled the scene. My husband stopped, helped the injured man to the side of the road, began basic first aid, and called EMS.Posted on Feb 21, 2010 - 10:16 PM by Ammerah Saidi in The Learning Curve
On January 29th, I received my official letter of termination. Our district has lost more than a million dollars in funding and any new teachers were immediately cut. On February 1st, I received my official letter of re-assignment. This story has a happy beginning.Posted on Feb 14, 2010 - 03:58 PM by Tim Curley in ImprovEducation
When Melia Dicker, IDEA's Communications Director, first asked me to become involved with this project, I thought, "Me?" Then she comes up with this "ImprovEducation" title, and I thought that maybe there could be something there for me to write about. The improvisational aspect of my teaching style comes naturally, and sometimes yields something pretty darn good.Posted on Feb 11, 2010 - 03:42 PM by Khalif Williams in Uncharted Parenting
Many of us who strive to nourish democracy in our society and strive tirelessly for equality, justice, peace and compassion have a break down in execution when it comes to our own home life. It's very easy for even the most mindful, progressive parents to replicate systems, dynamics, and roles we experienced in childhood, rather than the ones we aspire to create in our adult lives. Most of us working for in progressive education or for progressive causes didn't come from that experiential background.Posted on Feb 04, 2010 - 10:38 PM by Sara Schmidt in Uncharted Parenting
I want to buy everything.Posted on Feb 02, 2010 - 01:22 PM by Dana Bennis in The Landscape
The Obama administration is ramping up its focus on education following last week's State of the Union. Unfortunately, it does not seem to go very far in taking a broader look at learning and giving teachers and young people more of a voice in the education process. Positive proposals include expanding the system of rating schools to include more than just test scores and using a student growth-based metric rather than a static grade comparison across schools. However, there is still no talk about more authentic forms of assessment or supporting student growth beyond academics, and the Race to the Top initiative, which guides additional education spending, remains focused on linking... Can Democracy Be Disembodied?Posted on Feb 01, 2010 - 11:15 AM by Kristan Morrison in democracy.edu
This semester, I am teaching one section of my graduate-level foundations of education course as an online class. It is a synchronous class, meaning we use the Adobe Connect software to meet in a virtual classroom from 6-9 pm each Wednesday night. It is like a conference call on steroids -- we can hear one anothers' voices (assuming the technology is working for us, which, so far, has not always been the case), we can see visuals (such as documents I post, things I write on the whiteboard, videos, etc.), and we can do written chat.Posted on Jan 31, 2010 - 08:46 PM by Ammerah Saidi in The Learning Curve
"You're the worst teacher ever!" The last words of a ninth grader I had kicked out during final presentations.Posted on Jan 30, 2010 - 03:10 PM by Melia Dicker in The Landscape
"The interchange between student and teacher, the free inquiry that is promulgated in the classroom, a spirit of equality in the classroom, to me that is part of a democratic education." - Howard ZinnPosted on Jan 28, 2010 - 11:50 PM by Sara Schmidt in Uncharted Parenting
As a child, I developed a "Type A" personality pretty quickly.Posted on Jan 19, 2010 - 08:00 PM by Tim Curley in ImprovEducation
In my last posting, I wrote about the day I taught my students about quadrant graphs. The fact that I did so while not talking, using only hand signals and finger pointing, is what I mentioned in the post. I neglected to mention why I chose to introduce the graphs. Posted on Jan 18, 2010 - 06:26 PM by Ammerah Saidi in The Learning Curve
Paolo Freire writes, "Human existence cannot be silent nor can it be nourished by false words, but only by true words, with which men and women transform the world."Posted on Jan 11, 2010 - 08:04 PM by Ammerah Saidi in The Learning Curve
My friend and partner, Khadigah Alasry, in the fight to make education real again, developed a vision for a model of reform last year. We started presenting this model within the U.S. and over the internet. We've been invited to present in Dublin, the Cayman Islands, Hawaii, Dubai, Paris, and other places but due to our lack of funds and now time, we have had to kindly decline.Posted on Jan 10, 2010 - 05:20 PM by Claire Russell in Pulse
In schools across America, young teens walk their halls with the heavy burden of perfection always upon them. Whoever instills this need for being flawless is often the one pushing young people. Their parents, their teachers, their family. However, at my school there is a new kind of pressure that is exceedingly different from the classic one: The pressure to fail.Posted on Jan 08, 2010 - 10:58 AM by Kristan Morrison in democracy.edu
Like Alison Bagg Brink (see her latest blog post), I, too, am gearing up to return to teaching after my university's winter break. Unlike Alison, though, I will be getting a whole new set of students this semester. Teaching at a university on a semester schedule in which classes start anew at least two times a year has both its challenges and advantages for a democratically-minded educator.Posted on Jan 05, 2010 - 10:19 PM by Alison Bagg Brink in ImprovEducation
It isn't easy to get up at 5:00 am. It is even harder when you have had two wonderful weeks to wake-up at your leisure, wander around the house in slippers with a cup of coffee in your hand, and snuggle your own children all day long.Posted on Jan 02, 2010 - 02:15 PM by Tim Curley in ImprovEducation
One recent Monday, I did what I usually do before school. I stood outside the main entry, and greeted the kids as they were dropped off at the curb. I walked through the cafeteria and said hello to the older kids, the younger kids, and the few parents who eat breakfast at school. I do this because I see my role at school as being much more than a classroom teacher. El Verano School is a community, and I feel that we all need to share in that community.Posted on Dec 23, 2009 - 03:55 PM by Tim Curley in ImprovEducation
The newspapers today have articles stating that research shows that teaching is the happiest career one can choose. My students this year certainly place me in that category. This year has been very enjoyable, indeed. I have a group of students who have a few social leaders, as all groups do, and this year, those social leaders are also academic leaders. This has allowed me to focus less on discipline, and more on creatively approaching their learning needs. They seem to truly enjoy learning, and that has given me the freedom to really have a good time teaching them.Posted on Dec 21, 2009 - 10:47 PM by Ammerah Saidi in The Learning Curve
I've been gone a while--I know. But such is the nature of democratic education. Let me explain.Posted on Dec 20, 2009 - 05:00 PM by Claire Russell in Pulse
I write today from my heart, which, like my head is very confused and upset. I have been at my new school for nearly three months and I am happy to report I have not once been bullied, or teased -- until today. We all went through getting teased when we were children, and I have to admit I even did my fair share of teasing when I was young too, but it's an easy thing to fix. When you're teased as a child, you run to your teacher for comfort and advice. The scary thing is, this time the bully was my teacher.Posted on Dec 16, 2009 - 12:51 PM by Alison Bagg Brink in ImprovEducation
December drives me crazy.Posted on Dec 11, 2009 - 02:31 AM by Sara Schmidt in Uncharted Parenting
My name is Sara, and I'm a former homeschool basher.Posted on Dec 04, 2009 - 01:51 PM by Kristan Morrison in democracy.edu
The semester is winding down for my teacher education students and me. We are all filled with that sense of anticipation that comes when you see hard work reaching an end. It is at this time each semester that I start gathering my thoughts about changes I want to make to my courses for the new semester, and it is at this time when I ask my students to give me advice and feedback on how things went for them in my class. Inevitably, the conversation comes around to the reading responses -- the weekly written assignments where students give evidence of having read and processed the assigned texts.Posted on Nov 25, 2009 - 10:03 AM by Jonah Canner in Got Questions?
I am a high school teacher and adviser and lately the students seem to be pulling away, into smaller groups or individually. Many of them are pretty stressed with college applications and some realities setting in. Some of them are also bringing a lot of negativity into our meetings. We want to get everyone back together, and more bonded together as a group, so that we can bring each other up and support each other more than spreading negativity. We tried the human knot activity at our last meeting for an hour and weren't able to get it done. I am open to any and all suggestions that you have.Posted on Nov 24, 2009 - 03:36 PM by Tanya Reza in Op-Education
This past September, I was hired to teach first grade at a private Islamic school. The school housed grades K-12, and in addition to the standard language arts, mathematics, science and social studies; religious instruction and Arabic language were also offered. Due to low enrollment and a reduction in the anticipated school budget, I was laid off shortly after being hired. In the brief one week period that I actually taught, I struggled between doing what was right versus doing what was easy. In other words, I strived to teach in a manner that lived up to my ideals. However, I found myself defaulting to methods and practices that I despised about my own education.Posted on Nov 20, 2009 - 02:52 PM by Shawn Strader in Op-Education
Just about anybody who has attended public school has experienced the distinction that seems to often exist between student and teacher.Posted on Nov 18, 2009 - 02:02 PM by Jonah Canner in Got Questions?
This week I'll be asking the question. Here it is:Posted on Nov 18, 2009 - 10:57 AM by Alison Bagg Brink in ImprovEducation
This is my thirteenth fall as a teacher. This year has been wonderful so far. I have great students, colleagues that I respect, and a curriculum for the majority of my classes that I agree with philosophically.Posted on Nov 17, 2009 - 08:44 PM by Ammerah Saidi in The Learning Curve
So, there I stood. In front of my thirty 9th graders, hour after hour, watching them write letters to each other, put their gum under their desks, talk to their neighbors while the assigned worksheet on the parts of speech I just spent the night before diligently creating fell silently to the floor. Think I am being melodramatic? I wish! In one class, I laughed to myself for a solid thirty seconds (a long time in high school time), after I spent three minutes going back and forth with a student as to why throwing wads of paper at a girl he did not like was unacceptable.Posted on Nov 11, 2009 - 08:25 PM by Jonah Canner in Got Questions?
This "democratic" approach to education seems nice, but don't kids need to know certain facts to thrive in the world?Posted on Nov 11, 2009 - 11:41 AM by Kristan Morrison in democracy.edu
In my efforts to model democratic practices to pre-service teachers, I ask my students at the beginning of each class, "Are there any questions, comments, concerns, suggestions, complaints?" Usually I am met with silence or with just basic housekeeping-type questions (e.g. when do we have to take Praxis II? etc.). Occasionally, though, a student will offer a concern or complaint about the work load or impending due dates, or they'll propose a change to a grading rubric item. For example, in the last month, I had students request to be able to pre-record their Pecha Kucha presentation (a sort of slam poetry form of powerpoint presentation -- 20 slides in 20 seconds each to explore an... Worry is an expression of lovePosted on Nov 05, 2009 - 03:32 PM by Scott Nine in Uncharted Parenting
As a parent of a ten- and two-year old, I continue to be awed and humbled by what parenting asks of me. Whoever said that raising children is like watching your heart move around outside your body was spot on. As an educator who spends my day with other people's kids, I'm also deeply aware of the ways parents and educators can work and grow together as well as the potential impact when we don't.Posted on Nov 01, 2009 - 06:47 PM by Ammerah Saidi in The Learning Curve
My first week into teaching after my year in graduate school, I was filled with grand ideas and ideals as to what I would do in my classroom to help my students liberate themselves from the intellectual shackles of US public education. I entered my classroom and my school with the belief that my students and I would revolutionize the educational experience in Detroit forever--no hyperbole intended. This is how deeply I believed in my students and their potential to be positive change agents in a world which deemed them failures or equally insulting, average at best.Posted on Oct 26, 2009 - 09:25 PM by Melia Dicker in News Feed
A Washington lawyer friend recently told me about layoffs at his firm. I asked him who was getting axed. He said it was interesting: lawyers who were used to just showing up and having work handed to them were the first to go because with the bursting of the credit bubble, that flow of work just isn’t there. But those who have the ability to imagine new services, new opportunities and new ways to recruit work were being retained. They are the new untouchables.
That is the key to understanding our full education challenge today. Those who are waiting for this recession to end so someone can again hand them work could have a long wait. Those with the imagination to make themselves untouchables—to invent smarter ways to do old jobs, energy-saving ways to provide new services, new ways to attract old customers or new ways to combine existing technologies—will thrive. Therefore, we not only need a higher percentage of our kids graduating from high school and college—more education—but we need more of them with the right education. ...
... Just being an average accountant, lawyer, contractor or assembly-line worker is not the ticket it used to be. As Daniel Pink, the author of “A Whole New Mind,” puts it: In a world in which more and more average work can be done by a computer, robot or talented foreigner faster, cheaper “and just as well,” vanilla doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s all about what chocolate sauce, whipped cream and cherry you can put on top. So our schools have a doubly hard task now—not just improving reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity.
What are schools really teaching kids?Posted on Oct 25, 2009 - 06:25 PM by Melia Dicker in News Feed
Do we really need school? I don’t mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don’t hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn’t, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever “graduated” from a secondary school.
Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn’t go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry, like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead. In fact, until pretty recently people who reached the age of thirteen weren’t looked upon as children at all. Ariel Durant, who co-wrote an enormous, and very good, multivolume history of the world with her husband, Will, was happily married at fifteen, and who could reasonably claim that Ariel Durant was an uneducated person? Unschooled, perhaps, but not uneducated.
We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think of “success” as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, “schooling,” but historically that isn’t true in either an intellectual or a financial sense. And plenty of people throughout the world today find a way to educate themselves without resorting to a system of compulsory secondary schools that all too often resemble prisons. Why, then, do Americans confuse education with just such a system? What exactly is the purpose of our public schools?
Get It Wrong Before You Google to Learn It BetterPosted on Oct 22, 2009 - 06:48 PM by Melia Dicker in News Feed
We live in an era where the answer to almost any fact-based question is no further than a Google search away, but Scientific American highlights a study suggesting subjects forced to get something wrong before being told the answer learn it better.
The 3 R’s? A Fourth Is Crucial, Too: RecessPosted on Oct 20, 2009 - 11:19 AM by Melia Dicker in News Feed
The best way to improve children’s performance in the classroom may be to take them out of it.
New research suggests that play and down time may be as important to a child’s academic experience as reading, science and math, and that regular recess, fitness or nature time can influence behavior, concentration and even grades.
A study published this month in the journal Pediatrics studied the links between recess and classroom behavior among about 11,000 children age 8 and 9. Those who had more than 15 minutes of recess a day showed better behavior in class than those who had little or none. Although disadvantaged children were more likely to be denied recess, the association between better behavior and recess time held up even after researchers controlled for a number of variables, including sex, ethnicity, public or private school and class size.
Prisoners or Students?Posted on Oct 20, 2009 - 01:14 AM by Ammerah Saidi in The Learning Curve
I'm 5'2" and about 105 lbs. I'm small--so walking through the hallways of the new school in which I just got a teaching position, I get mistaken all the time as a student, by students and teachers alike. This gives my students the impression that I'm a pushover, and staff the idea that I won't last in this school past a couple of months. But what my misleading physique grants me is a world into the daily feelings of my students inside a building they will spend four of their formative years in--if they make it through four.Posted on Oct 19, 2009 - 06:38 PM by admin in News Feed
To most people, this school probably looks like chaos.
But at The Village Free School, chaos is part of the equation.
In this “free democratic” school, kids call the shots on most things. They decide what they want to learn, when they want to learn and how they want that learning to look.
The school’s philosophy? The most substantive learning takes place when students initiate the learning process themselves.
“Kids are learning all the time,” Executive Director Scott Nine says. “It’s not just in certain classes or during certain periods of the day.”