Trailblazers- Student Driven EdMagazine

Posted on June 11, 2017 by boadams1

During the spring semester of this 2016-17 academic year, senior Anya Smith-Roman and junior Abigail Emerson, of Mount Vernon Presbyterian School, led efforts to create and publish a new journal for education – all originating from the student-learner voice and position. Check out their first publication!

The Life of Pinya

It’s official, the first edition of Trailblazers, a student driven magazine on the Education Transformation Movement, is here with young writers from around the world contributing!!!! My peers in the Innovation Diploma, Abigail Emerson and Kaylyn Winters, and I have been working at this project all year after some last minute edits over the summer, we now feel it is time to ship the idea and get it out into the world.

So please check out our first edition which includes:

A Letter From the Founders

Meet the Curators: Anya Smith-Roman, Kaylyn Winters, Abigail Emerson

The learner-centered movement: Q&A: Sparkhouse Conference

Creating Something New: Brady Vincent

Change is a Conversation: Neel Pujar

Free Ranged vs. Caged: Kim Mi Yeoh

Intelligence: Cali Ragland

Community Connections

Good Reads

Thanks to everyone who helped make this possible!! Can’t wait for issue 2!

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Visit to Brightworks School

Posted on February 24, 2016 by boadams1

I met Gever Tulley in 2010. We spoke at the same TEDxAtlanta event, and then Gever extended his stay in Atlanta so we could hang out and talk more about schools and education. Mostly, we talked about how schools could better “mirror” deep learning.

After that, I rushed out and bought his book, 50 Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do), and my sons and I added it to our Father-Son-Based-Learning (#fsbl) excursions. And we regularly re-watch Gever’s talks from the big TED stage.

Gever and I keep up sporadically, and I would count him as a huge influencer of mine. When he founded Brightworks, an amazing, change-everything school, I followed with great interest and excitement.

So, I consider it a dream come true that I was able to visit Brightworks on Tuesday, February 23! The two-hour immersion was intriguing and inspiring and provocative. Having colleagues from Mount Vernon and Hillbrook School enriched the experience even further because we were able to exchange curiosities, reactions, inquiries, and ponderings.

What stood out most to me? The high degree of ownership that students possessed and demonstrated about their relationship to learning. The high degree of trust that “collaborators” (the Brightworks word for teachers) exhibited for the learners. The empowered vibe that children exuded as they explored deep curiosities and thrived in a culture of exploration-expression-exhibition arcs of learning. The mixed-age “bands” that prioritized relationship and community. Content was at the service of explored curiosity, rather than any sense of compliance-based digestion of content out of context.

My visit will have me thinking for a long time!

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What if form followed function in school? Inspired by David Epstein #TED talk

Posted on April 30, 2014 by boadams1

On May 11, 2014, I will (quietly) celebrate a third anniversary. That day will mark the moment that I have spent exactly three years watching a TED talk every day.

Being an educator, as I watch TED talks, I think about how they might “fit” into school. I sometimes imagine the speaker as a student in a typical high school, and I wonder what courses and subjects his or her talk would align with.

And often that exercise bothers me. It bothers me because I imagine a speaker like David Epstein prepping and preparing his “Are athletes really getting faster, better, stronger?” talk embedded below. I wonder…. Would David be doing this “project” in math class? In science class? In history class? In English class as a persuasive speech assignment? Maybe in some technology course? Would he be so lucky as to have teachers who would allow a single project to “count” for all of his courses? After all, the project integrates a number of disciplines that we subdivide and separate in school.

And that entire imagining bothers me because of the ridiculousness of having to think this way. Why do we continue to remain so wed to the unnatural subdivision of the “school subjects?”

What if at least part of David’s school day allowed for him to pursue the project of his dreams and interests and the subject-area lenses were more like threads in a tapestry that David is weaving?

And what if that deep project identification and discernment had developed partly because of more innovative “homework” that encouraged and made room for David to explore his developing passions and curiosities?

And what if the subject areas in his school behaved a bit more like “subjects on demand” and recitations in which David could schedule time with a relative expert to spend some concentrated time digging into the statistics or biology specificity that he needed for his emerging understanding?

And what if his assessments were more akin to badges and endorsements showcasing the disciplinary, interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and transdisciplinary knowledge, skills, and understandings that David was building?

And what if David were at the center of his own progress reporting and learning conferences?

Then school would look different. Because form follows function.

Enjoy the talk. It’s amazing.

Moonshot teaching: “real-life problems that require hands-on solutions”

Posted on April 10, 2014 by boadams1

“Getting Our Students to Own Their Educational Experience”
Raymond W. Cirmo
Independent School Magazine
Winter 2014
(HT @nicolenmartin)

If our interest and motivation are piqued when we work on tasks that interest us, that directly involve us, that have outcomes based on our abilities, and that succeed or fail based on our level of understanding, effort, and involvement, then why not apply this same logic to student learning in our classrooms?

To do this, we first need to realize that the students are not in our classroom, we are in their classroom. And the room is not set up for us to teach; it is here for us to be facilitators in the students’ learning. We are here for the students, not the other way around. This means that we need to educate them in a fashion that makes sense to them and the world they live in. And the best approach I have found is to assign them tasks involving real-life problems that require hands-on solutions — in other words, learning by creating and doing.