In public education, we face self-imposed obstacles to change. We also face a fiscal apocalypse – one time moneys are disappearing just as local revenue has. We’re not electing politicians likely to raise taxes. We’re electing politicians likely to cut muscle and bone.
Moreover, we’re going to experience confusion as a country about what it means [...]
My brain itches.
I’m hitting the wall separating what I saw and what I see. I need to pull an Inception and start dreaming the wall and walking on it instead of familiar ground.
I’m looping with our school’s inaugural class for the third straight year. I feel a desperate need to get it right. I [...]
As I work on this year’s curriculum map, I’m trying to set up a learning space bounded by the minimum number of teacher-imposed, useful constraints necessary to promote student-directed democracy, community, and learning.
My map this year will look more course-specific than last year’s meta-map, which I think is still a useful model for project-based work. [...]
I have been thinking a lot about democratic education since starting work on the collaborative blog CoöpCatalyst. If you haven’t yet considered blogging or blogging with an audience of peers dedicated to improving teaching and learning for kids, I urge you to start.
The following represents my best thinking so far about growing democratic education within [...]
So, we’re about to hit our testing window. I don’t have a lot of innovative testing ideas to share, though our school is doing some awesome work to make students feel comfortable and cared for during their three-week ordeal. We’re also going to reinvent our daily schedule after the tests to delve school-wide into what [...]
Scary Thoughts
Schools wound kids and adults. Our answer: more of the same.
Executive power over schools is expanding without checks and balances from teachers, parents, or students. Democracy is virtually extinct within schools outside of civics and government standards. It’s not impossible that scripted instruction and instructional designs from virtual and F2F content providers will [...]
The “blob” wins according to Tom Vander Ark (@tvanderark). President Obama’s ESEA reauthorization blueprint gives all but the lowest-performing 5% of schools “a free pass” on fixing schools for our most under-served students.
What is the “blob?” Teachers’ unions? Teachers? Mediocre schools? Mediocre teachers? All of the above? The soft bigotry of low expectations?
As much as [...]
Chad teaches humanities at a charter school and blogs on reforming classroom practice and democratic education.
