Nineteen years ago, a group of Milwaukee-area teachers had a vision.
They wanted not only to improve education in their own classrooms and schools, but to help shape reform throughout the public school system in the United States.
The subject of this course is rhetoric: the study of how language works and how to make it work well. The goal is to help you develop your rhetorical skills—skills that are essential to success not only at the university but also in the world beyond the classroom. All of you are already somewhat skilled in rhetoric, in more or less intuitive ways. But the difference between intuitive rhetoric and conscious, artful rhetorical is something like the difference between walking and dancing, or between tossing a ball around and playing an organized sport. Our goal, then, is to develop your conscious rhetorical skills. Go there
Our mission is for every Harlem Success student to graduate from college. College graduation is emphasized from the moment our students enter kindergarten. Each grade is referred to by its college graduation year and each classroom is named after the college attended by the lead teacher. Students will go on field trips to college campuses to experience firsthand what it means to be a college student.
Faced with increasingly well-documented slumps in learning at a critical age, educators in New York and across the nation are struggling to rethink middle school, particularly in cities, where the challenges of adolescent volatility, spiking violence and lagging academic performance are more acute. As they do so, they are running up against a key problem: a teaching corps marked by high turnover, and often lacking expertise in both subject matter and the topography of the adolescent mind.
SchoolTool is a project to develop a common global school administration infrastructure that is freely available under an Open Source license. School Tool encompasses three sub-projects:
At Harvard, 12 faculty members from Harvard Business School and Harvard Graduate School of Education launched the Public Education Leadership Programme (Pelp). The aim was to improve the administrative management and the educational results of nine urban school systems, including Boston, Chicago and San Francisco.
The three-year programme had two principle components: a one-week executive education project for leadership teams from each district and a schedule of research to develop ways of helping district leadership teams operate efficiently.
In 1993 most people had not heard of the Internet. Yet there I was, in my attic office, corresponding with 300 people around the globe on a discussion list for training and development managers. Although many of us worked in organizations with e-mail systems (some of us in the corporate world, others in academia) all of us knew we were doing something revolutionary. We were working outside of our organizational silos, talking with one another about topics ranging from the development of 360-degree multi-rater feedback systems to someday facilitating classes online. We were doing this without having met one another, having much knowledge of one another's organizations, or making a specific intentional effort to learn from one another. Nevertheless we were networking and we were learning nonstop.
It's too bad that few current-day elearning programs incorporate some of the lessons learned on that list: that learning happens in context, with the help of other people, when you are motivated to learn the subject, and spurred on by originality.
Just because most kids go to a high school in your neighborhood or across town doesn’t mean you have to do the same. Students come from different backgrounds and have unique dreams—one school or style of learning may not be ideal for everyone.
At Insight School of Washington, we recognize that many students are far more likely to succeed when they have greater control over their education.
Insight School of Washington is a full-time, diploma-granting online public high school where students complete their studies at their own time, place, and pace.
Maybe an interesting idea would be to take a text that is going to be read.. then read it through with a group of high acheivers... then publish the text with the comments interposed... sort of like the talmud or gemorah which captured the conversation on the same page...
We are in the last 5 or 6 weeks of the semester, and I'm having a great time with most of my 10th - 12th graders. A couple of stories that stand out: Cailin's abilitiy to see connections between a journal-entry-like blog post and an essay she is writing for English class... Nichole's amazing blog by now... John's podcasting habits... and more!
9th Graders Blog at East Side Community HS, NYC
We are in the last 5 or 6 weeks of the semester, and I'm having a great time with most of my 9th graders. They have developed good habits of mind and work, and I'm just their consultant. Christy's story of her relationship with Flickr continues to blossom. She set up a group in Flickr. I'm also interested to see Jose and Zadia move beyond their comfortable subjects. Blogging is a n interesting process to watch!
Students Blogging with Self-Selected Content
It may not be overly dramatic, but I'm enjoying these moments in my classroom, when I can go around and interview students, simply asking them, "What are you doing?" This was recorded on a Monday at the beginning of a regular week -- when there are no planned vacations or breaks... just four straight days of blogging. What I'm finding exciting this year is the ways I've found to allow students to find their own subject matter around which to read, write, find images, and listen to and create podcasts.
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