This interesting blog post on School Spring describes a growing trend of student-led conferences. If the role of student can be successfully expanded into conferences, could it be elsewhere in the schooling process, as well?
Professor Sugata Mitra’s famous ‘Hole in the Wall’ experiment clearly shows the tremendous potential of motivation on the part of students. When we look at a school, and its design and function, shouldn’t a first question be: Does this school work to elicit or suppress student and teacher motivation?
Each year at Northwest Passage High School students complete the Hope Survey, that measures student engagement, academic press, goal orientation, belongingness, and autonomy.
This allows the school to get a sense of how much and whether hope is being grown. The school has found that hope is built when students are given choice and autonomy.
Recently in the Wall Street Journal and Education Next there were accounts of the origins of chartering. We thought we might take the liberty of adding our version, since the first legislative implementation of the idea occurred in Minnesota and a number of those now in Education|Evolving were involved.
Children are living in the most intensely stimulating period in the history of the earth. They’re being besieged with information from every platform…and we’re penalizing them from being distracted. From what? Boring stuff.
Pathways Early College Innovation High School is one of the two Innovation Schools that opened this year under a new Massachusetts law allowing for the creation of district schools with exemption from many rules and regulations. The school partners with Gateway to College to provide early-enrollment college options for motivated students that seek to expand their limits.
In this report to Minnesota’s Association of School Administrators, the organization’s executive director wonders whether states need entirely new systems to meet today’s educational goals.
An article in the New York Times this past week pushed back against the caricature of AFT President Randi Weingarten by Waiting for Superman. There is truth to Weingarten’s sentiment that unions have become a scapegoat. That is why (politically) unions have an incentive to take the offense and get out from under this pile. Say, “We'll accept accountability, but give us control.” That can be a game changer.
In this guest post Kari Thierer, National Director of School and Network Support for Big Picture Learning, describes how students in Big Picture students have the opportunity to learn through apprenticeship, and mentorship. She describes the central importance of autonomy for the school to succeed with its non-traditional model, including authority over setting their schedule and determining how students will demonstrate achievement.
In this case study of several teacher-led schools in the upper Midwest, Claremont University researcher Charles Taylor Kerchner found some interesting things. The schools use resources differently than traditional district schools. They also have constructed a much different method of teaching. And, they slice up authority and responsibility differently–including assigning a good bit of responsibility for learning to the students.
