So one of my students posted this note on facebook with the title "The Concept of School:"

So I just had to respond, right? This was my response... (and yes, I did get my student's permission to post his note on the blog. And yes, I love that my students are willing to even engage in the question.) So here was my response:

And here was his response:

I'm going to add a few more things here... I think that it is important to note a few things... one, even at SLA, we all can get frustrated by what we have to do, but I think that's o.k. Life is hard sometimes, and we all get frustrated and learning how to deal with that is one of the most important lessons we can teach. And we shouldn't just learn only what we want to learn for any number of reasons, not the least of which is that we don't always know what we want to learn until we are learning it. But also, struggle is o.k. In fact, struggle is downright good. But it's important to ask the questions that my student asked, and I think it's all the more important that we take the time to engage fully and seriously in the answers. I don't think that conversation between us is done. There are days when I hope he will take my ideas to heart. There are days when he will come back and give me a lot to think about. (And yes, his opening salvo definitely did.) This all is a snippet of a long conversation about this stuff, and that's a good thing.

Oh... and yes, this all happened because kids and teachers "friended" each other. These are the conversations we can have when we all remember that we have to interact as people, not as subject and object, and not just teacher and student. If and when the technology facilitates that, all the better.

I'm writing this post sitting on the steps in my backyard (yay wifi!) and watching my kids play with some of the neighborhood kids. In six hours, I get on a plane to San Jose where I'll be presenting at the Innovative Learning Conference and then it's back on a plane so that I can be back at SLA when it opens on Tuesday morning.

I don't encourage or endorse that kind of nuttiness, but the sad thing is that while the specifics of my travelling may be something that most teachers are strange, all over America today, teachers are grading papers over their morning coffee, principals are desperately trying to keep up on their emails, and educators are thankful for just one more day to try to catch up.

This is part of what I mean when I talk about putting good people into bad systems. In Philadelphia, a typical high school teacher would have over 165 students on their roster. This is why many teachers who would like to do authentic assessment regress to the simplest form of assessment or why teachers grade student writing by making grammar corrections on the first page only and then reading for content only on the rest of the essay. It's why some science teachers teach from textbooks, rather than asking kids to delve deeply, because with 165 kids, you can at least feel like you got "through" the material and had some rudimentary form of assessment because the idea of trying to help that many students through a true, deep level of inquiry seems daunting at best and impossible at worst.

And yet, there are teachers all over this country doing their best, and most of them aren't blogging. They are in the classrooms for 10-12 hours a day. They are bringing home papers to grade, and doing physics experiments with paper towel tubes, and as they hit their fifth, tenth, twentieth years in the classroom, they are forever making Faustian bargains about the balance between life and work.

And let me say this -- that's no way to run a public education system.

I want to celebrate every teacher who has made this job a calling. Thank you. But my concern is that this nation thinks that building an entire system around martyrdom is the way to go -- that if you aren't spending 80 hours a week and thousands of your own dollars, you can't be an effective Title I school teacher. (And yes, I know that it's not THAT much better in the wealthier districts.) We cannot build a national system on the idea that KIPP and TFA and the 60-70 hour work week is acceptable. It's not.

So as I watch Jakob and Theo play, stealing a moment where I can both be a dad (you have NO idea how many breaks I've taken in writing this entry) and a principal (I've answered about ten emails during the writing too,) I have a call to arms for us all.

Every time we see a teacher celebrated for their Herculean efforts, let's all be sure to ask the following questions:

• What can be done to support and sustain you?
• How can we change the system that more people can be as successful as you?
• How can we create schools where it does not require Herculean efforts to be a successful teacher?

Until we are willing to engage with those questions, we are going to continue down the path of the unrealistic and unattainable expectations for our urban teachers and our urban schools, and we're going to continue to wonder why so many of those schools aren't giving the kids the education they deserve.

And with that, I'm off to steal a few hours of playing with my kids. Have a wonderful Sunday.

Tags: school_reform, sustainability

SLA History teachers Gamal Sherif and Joshua Block were featured in the national publication Education Week in a story, "Historic Election and New Tech Tools Yield Promising Vistas for Learning " talking about how the SLA history teachers are using the 21st century tools to examine the Presidental election.

As the Nov. 4 election approaches, Mr. Sherif's students will continue blogging about the issues, and start creating their own campaign ads that promote the candidates' platforms.

Those kinds of activities have gone a long way toward getting students' attention for election-related lessons, said Joshua Block, a humanities teacher at the same school, the Science Leadership Academy. He set up an online discussion group about election issues after his students spent most of one period in a heated debate about the economy and the candidates' plans to address the nation's financial ills.

"I want to make sure they can discuss [the issues] in a sustained manner without getting annoyed, without attacking each other," Mr. Block said.

"Often on these forums you hear from students who don't necessarily speak up in verbal discussions," he said, "but they will when they have a chance to think and compose their ideas online."

They can also continue the discussion far beyond the confines of the classroom, he added. One recent debate, Mr. Block said, continued over the weekend and ended with dozens of online posts from students, some of whom suggested readings and other resources for their classmates.

Read the whole article!

Tags: sla, ed_week

A reminder that the deadline to submit a proposal for EduCon 2.1 is November 1st! We are looking for folks who want to bring people together to learn about and talk about how we can investigate the marriage of pedagogy and technology to make our schools better. The instructions for submitting a proposal can be found on the conference wiki.

And even if you don't want to submit a proposal, we want you there! So be sure to register to attend -- and of course, before EduCon is Gary Stager's Constructing Modern Math and Science Knowledge. You can register for both at our site.

Come see SLA on Friday, attend our Friday night "Future of Education" panel, and then spend Saturday and Sunday at sessions run by some of the most innovative educators, including Will Richardson, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, Gary Stager, members of the SLA faculty and many, many more!

So a few weeks ago, I got the chance to speak at IgnitePhilly. You get five minutes -- you prepare twenty slides, and you get fifteen seconds a slide. It's a really, really fun, fast-paced way to try to communicate an idea, and the evening was a ton of fun. It was amazing for me to get to talk about school reform and 21st Century schools in an audience of so many new media / social media / creative class folks in Philadelphia. If you get the chance to go to an IgnitePhilly event, do so. It's a blast.

And it was really fun and tough to try to boil down what I think and believe about school reform to a five minute speech to non-educators. And it's a good thing I talk fast. Enjoy.

[Cross-posted at Leader-Talk.]

This is an extension of some thinking I was doing in this entry -- Citizenship, Workforce and the Ethic of Care.

Nel Noddings writes a great deal about the ethic of care -- the idea that our relationships with students should be grounded in "receptivity, relatedness, and responsiveness" -- and her work has been important to me in thinking about my relationship with students and in the way we try to craft relationships at SLA.

The sad thing, of course, is that there are many, many caring adults in schools, yet students do not feel cared for. We have to ask ourselves why this is... the vast majority of teachers went into teaching because they care about kids, because they want to be positive influences in the lives of children, and yet -- especially in our high schools -- it doesn't seem to happen. And, of course, for many of our at risk students, when they don't feel cared for, they drop out.

So what causes the disconnect? Why do adults care and yet students don't feel cared for?

That question begs us to examine the structures and systems -- both philosophical and procedural -- that make up our schools and are, seemingly, getting in the way of caring relationships between students and teachers.

So then, some thoughts...

• School Level: We need to create space for adults and students to come together around their shared humanity, not around a subject to be taught. For us, that's Advisory, but that can take many forms. Noddings suggests the idea that students and teachers could take meals together, for example. Just that one change could create upheaval in the way many traditional schools look at their structures.
• Societal Level: We need to create policies that encourage teachers and students to look at each other with humanity -- and that means finding ways to look at all of a students' work, not just a test score. Again, this could look at a school accreditation program similar to Middle States where the entire school is assessed.
• Semantic Level: We need to stop talking about what schools "create," schools don't create the "21st Century Workforce." Doing that encourages us to think about our students as objects -- that education is something that is done to them. We need to change our language so that even the very way we talk about education breaks down that barrier between school and student... between subject and object.

I really think this is one of the major problems we have in schools today -- they don't feel like very caring institutions, and that needs to change at a very foundational level. We need to better leverage the enormous good will that most teachers enter the profession. We need to remember that teachers come into the profession to make children's lives better.

The good news is that despite every structural impediment there is -- and it's damned near complete these days -- students and teachers keep finding ways to connect as real people all over our country. We just need to change the system to make it a little easier, that's all.

Tags: caring, nel_noddings

Over the past few years, many administrators have asked me how SLA has such an incredible faculty, and while I think there are many reasons, not the least of which are the colleagues that you get to work with and the edu-blogger network that has made SLA more well-known than the average high school, I do think there are some things we do are replicable for schools that are looking to both get more candidates for teaching positions and find teachers more aligned with their school's philosophy in their candidate pool.

• Write a job description of your school that speaks directly to the mission of your school. For example, the first qualification we list on the page (after needs to be certified) is "Must believe we teach students before subjects." Don't be afraid to turn-off some teachers with it if you feel that it will excite the teachers you want.
• Increase your reach using online tools -- I believe that teachers will move to go places where they are valued. For progressive schools, I strongly suggest the Coalition of Essential Schools Job Board, but I know of schools that had success using the EdWeek job board also. A principal here in Philly has had success using Craigslist too.
• Don't forget about the ed schools. We reach out to education schools near and far. They have alumni lists, job fairs, departmental list-servs, and they have lots of teachers looking for jobs.
• Get out to job fairs -- send teachers, send students, send parents, send admins, but get to job fairs.
• Have an interview process that is designed to ask teachers to think about the things that matter most to you. A lot of schools design the interview process to find the "best" teacher, but I think that's a mistake -- I think you want to find the "best fit" teachers. So design an interview process that allows teachers to show you how their vision of education fits with your school's vision of education -- and include teachers, students, parents in that process.
• And then, of course, walk the walk of the vision of your school so that the teachers you recruit feel validated and excited by their choice. That's the hardest part.

I do believe that -- just like with students -- if more teachers found schools that matched their teaching and learning styles, we'd have a lot more success in our schools. And I think those teachers are out there -- especially all those who are leaving the system frustrated -- who could make our schools better. I hope someone finds this helpful.

Tags: recruiting, teachers, school_reform

Last week, four of our upperclassmen raced each other down a very public flight of stairs. I smiled and waved them on, despite the many important eyes that turned to follow their movement. There would be no stopping them anyway — these students were drawn by the irresistible light of celebrity. When they reached the bottom, they gathered around the special guest and, giddy for autographs, attempted conversation. One asked for his phone number. She received it, and two of the kids got warm bear hugs.

The guest was renowned intellectual and author Cornel West. The stairs were in the newly renovated Franklin Theater, part of Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute. The students were juniors at the Science Leadership Academy. They were invited to serve as hosts for the Institute’s “Politics of Slavery and Race in America” lecture. As a bonus for taking tickets and guiding people to their seats, they were given free admission to the event.

This comes from Matt Kay's latest post on the New York Times Lesson Plans site -- The New Village. In it, he speaks to the need for the adults of a community to step up and work with kids to give them the role models they need. He does this in the context of our Franklin Institute partnership, our Individualized Learning Plans and the experiences that our students have through those programs -- including meeting Cornell West last week.

It's a fantastic piece of writing, and he speaks to the transformative nature of these partnerships -- and how important they are for our kids. I just want to add that it is my hope that the adults who work with the students of SLA feel, in some way, transformed and enriched by their interaction with the kids too.

I'm re-examining the work of Nel Noddings, so I'm reading The Challenge to Care in Our Schools, so that's what is informing this post. On a personal note, It's exciting to reexamine her work after a few years away from it, especially since her work has been so formative in the way I think about the structure of the relationships at SLA. (There's a few dozen posts worth of work in that last sentence, but anyway...)

Noddings argues that so many students don't think that teachers care about them and yet so many teachers do. What is the cause for this? One of the powerful arguments that Noddings makes is that the standards -- and I would argue, standardization -- movement has created an objectification of students. We search for the best way to teach some mythological "student" object and then attempt to craft systems where all students are taught that way. What we have done, in the service of worthy ideals, is create a distance between teacher and student and the distance between is a mandated curriculum where the "why" of what we teach is rarely questioned and the "what" is defined in such a way that students end up feeling that teachers care more about the subjects they teach than the students they teach.

Noddings writes in detail about the ramifications of that idea, and she puts forth a compelling argument for how we can change our schools to make them more humane places, but that's not what I want to write about today. (And Dan, before you think that Noddings is someone who is arguing for a wishy-washy definition of care, she's not. In fact, I think she's a theorist that if you were to read, you'd love because she's someone who gives powerful language to many of the things you do in your own practice.)

But I want to examine a different but necessary change in the rhetoric of schooling that, in my opinion, stems from this revaluation of care. It is common in the language of school reform to hear people talk about the need for a 21st Century workforce. Now, there are a lot of reasons why I think this is shooting too low, but Noddings offers another reason why that's the wrong lens. The notion that our job as teachers is to create a new workforce suggests to our students an objectified relationship that is the antithesis of care. To me, the language of school as pathway to workforce does not suggest an active, engaged, caring relationship between teacher and student. It, instead, suggests that education is something we do to kids in service of the larger need of society -- and a market economy -- to have an educated workforce. Personal growth, emotional well-being, the need to educate and care about whole child take a back seat in that rhetoric.

Instead, if we talk about schools that help students become 21st Century citizens, we can speak to their need to be engaged and involved in their entire world. We can talk about how our hope for them to find their place in our society, not just as worker but as person. That rhetoric, to me, speaks to a transaction of care, because it aspires to help students find a rich and meaningful life while also teaching the need to be part of the larger society in powerful ways. Surely, we can find ways to explain the need for mathematics, science, literature and the like through that rich lens. Surely, we can explain why our desire to teach those ideas to students speak to a care for them and for our world that can convey to students the belief that our schools -- and the people within it -- are there because they care about them.

[Forgive me if this is a post that isn't about the stuff I usually write about, but the idea was rumbling around, and here's where I put ideas that rumble around. -- Chris]

This post comes from thinking about the financial crisis of the past week (and next decade) and spending time with some old college friends of mine this weekend. Both are Wharton grads and both still are in the world of business. One is high ranking executive at a Fortune 50 company, and I always am intrigued to talk to them because their view on the world is very different than mine, even when our ethical values are often very similar.

This post comes at the intersection of two conversations we were having. On one level, I was listening to them discuss the financial realities of their businesses in the wake of everything going on. At another point, we were talking about the environment and issues of sustainability. What concerns me, and what I want to write about, is my creeping feeling that our current economic system is uniquely unsuitable to the need for a sustainable society.

The corporate structure -- by definition -- is designed for growth. That's where the shareholder profit comes in. Because there is a need to always take money out of the system to reward investment, a zero growth sustainable corporation -- by my definition, the ability to reach a stable presence in the market -- is a losing proposition.

Now, on any micro-economic level, that's fine. Companies come and go, but it strikes me that on the whole, we are reaching an end-game with a growth economy, as there is a limit how much markets can grow, and much of the growth we have seen of the past twenty years (the dot-com boom, the housing boom) has -- it seems to me -- been built on parlor games and mathematical tricks. We hope that new technologies, new innovations, will grow new markets. We hope that increased wealth of developing nations will mean growth for old corporations. But all of this also comes at a point where we are seeing a growing environmental crisis, as there are serious questions about the degree to which our planet can sustain our current environmental pace without serious repercussions.

Much of the current mainstream political debate deals with the need to tweak the current economic / environmental model. Do we regulate more? Do we bail out? Do we use market forces to encourage a reduced carbon footprint? It was fascinating for me to listen to two business executives agree that there should have been a massive gas tax years ago to a) change American behavior around gas consumption, b) raise necessary funds to fund alternative energy research and c) alter the market so that the the price of gasoline reflected the actual price of gas once the externality of pollution was factor in so that alternative energies became cheaper alternatives more quickly. Certainly, those are all important questions, and the need to question and alter the role of government in the coming years to deal with the realities of our changing world will be one of the fundamental question of the coming decade.

But at the root is the legal organism of the capitalist corporation. Has it outlived its usefulness? Have we, as a society - a world - reached a point in our evolution where the growth model of the market organism is more harmful than helpful? The sole proprietorship, the "mom and pop" did not have the need for growth that the corporation -- by definition -- has. I'm not suggesting that we can go back to an atomized capitalism - to the days of Adam Smith, nor am I arguing for a state-sponsored socialism (although is it just me or did we just nationalize a massive section of the banking industry last week?). Instead I am questioning our ability to imagine a new model of economics -- one that harnesses the best notions of the marketplace while recognizing the limits of growth as the altar at which business must worship? Can we imagine a model of economics where sustainability is the goal of business? Where the idea of "enough" at the macro level was considered? Is there a model of a market economy that does not have to include macro-economic growth?

Because I am concerned that without a new model, the macro-level rapaciousness of a corporate capitalism as that legal organism is currently constructed will lead us into a need for more and more where we must hope that technological innovations stretch ever-dwindling resources and increase the efficiency with which humans interact with their environment outpace the need for the market to grow. And that is a frightening end-game that, to me, we are destined some day to lose.

I start this post with an apology to Zac Chase -- who I gave a lot of (mostly good-natured) grief to as I worried about whether or not a new idea would work.

Last night, we had our 9th Grade Back to School Night. Zac had the idea of splitting up Back to School Night so that the 9th Grade parents could do a potluck dinner where they could sit with the other families in their advisory and eat and talk with them. They could meet with their advisors for the first time where it's not a report card conference. It was all fantastic theory, but it as it got closer, I kept seeing all the things that could go wrong -- parents might not bring food.... the conversations may not happen... it meant two Back to School Nights, which is taxing for staff... it was more planning at the start of a school year with a million things going on... new parents often are looking for a Back to School that feels like something they recognize... the list goes on. It's a classic administrator trap -- which is looking for all the reasons you shouldn't do something, rather than looking for the reasons to do something.

But we'd committed to doing it, and while I was worried about it, we were going to make it as special as possible. A lot of people, from Zac to me to Home and School parents did a lot of planning. Upper class students ran around after school to make sure the place looked great. We got the schedule of events to everyone. And I worried.

And then the funny thing happened -- parents came. They bought food. They sat together and shared stories of the first few weeks. They talked about why they came to SLA... or how they found out about it... and advisors talked and listened and learned about the families their students came from.

In short -- it was the best part of the evening. I'm sure the parents loved following their students' schedules, and I know how passionate and inspiring SLA teachers are when they talk about their classes, but as lovely as that part of the evening was (and I did manage to hear most of our teachers talking about their classes), the highlight was watching our new families make themselves part of our community along side students, teachers and returning parents. And the food was amazing too.

So, at a time in the school year when it would probably be really easy to fall back on what we know works -- and the time of SLA where we are starting to be able to say, "We've done it this way in the past" -- it's important to remember to keep trying new ideas. And it's important to be able to see the best reasons to do things, not just think of all the reasons not to. And it's important to have people on faculty who are willing to experiment and dream big and see ideas throught. And it's important to know how to nurture those people and their ideas. And it's also important to remember when, as principal, you just get out of the way and let the moment happen, even when you're worried.

And the best thing is that by doing that, I got yet another reminder of how much I love the community of SLA... and how much I can believe in the strengthen of this community we've built, and how everyone -- teachers, students, parents -- are so invested in bringing in the new class of SLA teachers and students into that culture.

Tags: SLA, leadership, innovation, community

Just have to pass along the wonderful blog post -- Teaching Without a Script -- by SLA English teacher / Athletic Director / Boys Basketball Coach / Slam Poetry Club Sponsor Matthew Kay. Matt has been asked to take part in the NY Times Online Blog "Lesson Plans," and his first blog entry shows the world what we at SLA have known since the inception of the school -- Mr. Kay has some serious chops.

On a personal level, I love this piece because -- on a very different level that the one I usually write about -- Matt has captured an amazing piece of what makes SLA so very special. And Matt is kind enough to share his class with me from time to time, although more and more, I wonder why the kids put up with me taking away from their time with a masterful young teacher like Mr. Kay.

Here's an excerpt:

So it is with the inquiry based learning that we model for the other schools in Philadelphia. Our ninth graders come to us shy about asking questions that are often scattered and incoherent. When encouraged, they open up, and then incessantly offer their ideas. (I illustrate this for all classes on the first full day of every year, when I put a big rubber ball under my shirt and pretend to give laborious birth to it. We name this child “my idea.” I pass it around nervously, and when someone drops it, I snatch it up and curl into the fetal position. They laugh. I eventually get over my shock and learn to trust again, slowly passing it, then throwing it around the room for everyone to touch. There are two morals: first, you can’t protect your idea forever, and second, our ideas grow when, by dialogue and debate, others are allowed to get their fingerprints on them.)

Go read the rest.

Tags: sla, matt kay, NYTimes

EduCon 2.1 keeps getting more exciting! Before EduCon 2.1 starts, Gary Stager is hosting the one-day Constructing Modern Math / Science Knowledge pre-conference event!

Gary is one of the most passionate and knowledgable educators out there, and he has put together an amazing line-up of some of the most original and innovative thinkers. This certainly will get anyone into the proper mindset for EduCon 2.1!

If you are looking to kick off EduCon with a great day of learning about how to use technology to enhance and transform STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) learning, come to the Constructing Modern Math / Science Knowledge pre-conference event!

Scheduled to speak [from the CMK website]:

• Dr. David Thornburg is one of the world's most popular ed tech speaker, author and futurist
• Brian Silverman has been involved in the invention of dozens of Logo versions (including LogoWriter & MicroWorlds), Scratch, LEGO robotics and the PicoCricket. An incomparable presenter, Brian is a Consulting Scientist to the MIT Media Lab, a brilliant mathematician and master tinkerer.
• Carolyn Staudt is a veteran science educator who leads professional development for the Concord Consortium. She will be leading presentations and workshops on scientific modeling with open-source computing tools.
• Ihor Charischak is a veteran mathematics educator and active NCTM member who recently retired from the Stevens Instiute of Technology's Center for Innovation in Engineering and Science Education. He will lead workshops on "Mathematics and Computing Innovation for Monday Morning."
• Dr. Gary Stager is the day's keynote speaker and organizer. He is a Visiting Professor at Pepperdine University, Executive Director of the Constructivist Consortium and a popular education journalist.

Registration is $90 before November 1st, and you can register for both EduCon 2.1 and CMM/SK on the EduCon Registration site.

Tags: educon, educon 2.1, gary stager, CMK

As many folks know, we are hosting EduCon again this year. We had a fantastic time last year, and for many of us at SLA -- students and faculty alike -- it was one of the highlights of our year.

EduCon only happens when a community of educators come together to make it something special. With that in mind, we are announcing our Call for Conversations for EduCon 2.1 -- January 23rd - 25th at Science Leadership Academy.

About EduCon 2.1:

EduCon 2.1 is both a conversation and a conference.
And it is not a technology conference. It is an education conference. It is, hopefully, an innovation conference where we can come together, both in person and virtually, to discuss the future of schools. Every session will be an opportunity to discuss and debate ideas -- from the very practical to the big dreams.

The Guiding Principles of EduCon 2.1

1. Our schools must be inquiry-driven, thoughtful and empowering for all members

2. Our schools must be about co-creating -- together with our students -- the 21st Century Citizen
3. Technology must serve pedagogy, not the other way around.
4. Technology must enable students to research, create, communicate and collaborate
5. Learning can -- and must -- be networked.

We want people to share ideas, lead conversations, challenge each other and have conversations that can further our dreams of what schools can and should be. We want sessions that move past the traditional presentation style of conferences to create interactive and engaging moments of learning for all involved.

Please consider submitting a proposal. All proposals are due Nov. 1st. Feel free to examine last year's sessions as a reference point.

Tags: EduCon,EduCon 2.1

[This was a request to post that was too good to pass up. This an amazing thing that David Eggers is doing with his TED Prize, and I hope they get tens of thousands of entries. With all the teacher and school-bashing we are hearing these days, it's wonderful to see TED and David Eggers teaming up to tell great stories. And it's also fun because we watched the David Eggers TEDTalk to launch SLA's faculty workshop this summer. Oh yeah... and I'm incredibly flattered that someone from TED reads my blog!]

This is Natasha Dantzig for the TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) Conference.

I know you're a big supporter of TED (I really like your blog), and I'm writing to let you know that organizers of the TED Prize have announced an open challenge in support of author and philanthropist Dave Eggers and his 2008 TED Prize wish to collect 1,000 stories of private citizens engaged in their local public schools. Each year, three individuals are granted the TED Prize, which provides winners with a wish to change the world, $100,000 in seed money, and the support of the TED community in making the wish come true.

As an extension of Eggers initial wish, the open challenge asks individuals to design and implement new projects for local public school students. The three winning entries will receive a pass to the sold out TED2009 Conference to be held in Long Beach, California on February 4-7, 2009. Additionally, Eggers asks local citizens to support 826 National, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping students, ages 6-18, with expository and creative writing at six locations across USA. Eggers co-founded the original 826 chapter, 826 Valencia, a nonprofit tutoring center and writing school for children, in 2002.

Entries are open to the public and may be submitted by visiting onceuponaschool.org and will be judged by a panel of educators, entrepreneurs, and creatives from the TED Community. Projects will be evaluated on the following criteria:

• Innovation: Was a new model used? Is the approach creative? Were the students provided with access to something new?
• Collaboration: How well did the project leaders work with the teacher/school? Did the project address a specific challenge or need of the students?
• Impact: What changed in the life of the students, teacher, and school? Was the community affected? Did the work inspire other private citizens to get involved?

The Deadline for submissions is October 31, 2008.

For more information, please visit: www.onceuponaschool.org
For more information on the TED Prize, please visit www.tedprize.org
For more information on Dave Eggers' wish, please visit http://www.tedprize.org/?page_id=7
For more information about 826 National, please visit http://www.826national.org/

I've been in Philadelphia for three years, and the School District has had three different leaders. There is not a single cabinet level position that is held by the same person that was holding it when I start. The district has absorbed over a quarter billion dollards of cuts in that time. One of the ancillary issues around that is that is that much of what people talk about is, not surprisingly, the palace intrigue and the latest personnel and structural changes, rather than talking about the big ideas around education reform, rather than talking about how we can transform our schools to reflect the world we live in today.

This summer was no exception to that rule as people wondered who was going be where, and what positions would and wouldn't survive the latest changes. And, in the end, it's too easy for people to be distracted by the intrigue and lose track of what matters -- what it means to teach and learn in our schools.

And even if we don't get distracted by that, we can drift too far from the practical to the theoretical, and we can worry and wonder about a thousand things.

But the great thing is that there's an antidote to all that talk. And that antidote happened today. The kids came back. They came back with all their energy and excitement and passion and life. And today, after the laptops went out and the schedules were filled out, we were reminded of what matters most -- the kids we teach.

SLA flat out crackled with life today. Kids were happy to be back, not just to see their friends but to see their teachers, to see their school. And I spent the afternoon walking in and out of classes, watching the process of building classroom communities resume and restart as teachers and students got down to the work of the school year.

And the building just felt right. We had our kids back.

That's the best lesson we relearn every September.

Seventy-five comments into a thread, Dan Meyer asks a really important question:

I got my 07-08 Geometry results back yesterday and they were not acceptable. Too many kids listing along at Basic levels, not enough kids rising to Proficiency. My question to so many commenters here: what would you have me do with that data?

As a principal who is both against standardized assessments and also very much measured by them, here's what I'd do:

First, let's work under the assumption that I've watched you teach, and I feel that you are a good teacher.

1. I would take the scores and compare them to grades. I believe that the multiple data points that go into making up a grade give us a richer sense a student's learning. So the first question is this -- Is there a correlation between student grades and scores? If there is -- or if there isn't -- what does that tell us?

2. The next thing I'd do is ask you for your assessment: Most importantly, what is your assessment of how the students learned Geometry? How does that line up with what the scores suggest? What surprised you? What was what you expected?
3. If -- as I would think -- you were surprised by the scores and you honestly feel like there was deeper learning than the scores suggest, then the question is this: Is there a disconnect between the way you're teaching the skills or the process or just the language and the way the state test assesses the learning? This raises several more questions:
   1. What are the assessments that you did in your classroom that would lead us to believe that the learning was more successful than the tests suggest?

   2. If we believe that your methods are successful, what do we do about the tests? Given that they are the coin of the realm, we cannot ignore them, so are there modifications we need to make? Can we make them without harming the learning you see going on?
   3. There is something going on in your class if your sense -- based on the work you see every day -- is that the scores really are not reflective of what they've learned. Is there something going on with the multiple opportunity style of assessment that you're doing such that on a one-shot test the kids aren't able to replicate their learning? Do you need to just take two weeks before the test to do some explicit teaching on how the way they've learned can translate to a test? Do you need to give them more opportunities during the year to take tests that mimic the structure of the state test?

Much of test taking is about the skill of making sure your knowledge and skills translate well on the test. The hard part, I really believe, is making sure that the learning you see every day in your class is measured on the tests, especially if you don't teach in a pedagogical fashion that is in line with the state assessment. And I really do believe it's important to tell us that the tests tell us something, but they don't come close to telling us everything.

Anyway, that's what I'd do.

Tags: danmeyer, high-stakes tests, assessment

Go read Gary Stager's article "School Wars" in GOOD Magazine?

Here's a sample:

The tragedy of No Child Left Behind, and the private and public efforts to undo its damage, is that not every child is given the chance to achieve her full potential in a caring, creative, dynamic, and intellectually rich environment. And in the absence of ongoing classroom innovation and grassroots advocacy, NCLB has taken over.

These days, anyone who attended school is an expert in education and everybody has a plan to “fix” the public schools—the philanthropist, the businessman, the bureaucrat, the politician. For ages, business leaders and politicians have wanted to privatize the entire system and let the marketplace sort things out—as it did with Enron, Chinese pet food, or oil prices. Now, they’re taking control of schools through philanthropy. Parents of means, meanwhile, are opting out in record numbers, sending their children to private schools, or charter schools, or are homeschooling them. Indeed, as the federal government has steadily eroded public support for the public school system, through propaganda and failed policies, children are the collateral victims. The winners of the school wars remain uncertain; the losers can be found in almost any classroom.

Go read now.

[O.k. -- this too is an insanely geeky post. I promise, I'll write about education theory or EduCon or something like that soon. But for now, I've got my geek on.]

This is a very simple block in Moodle -- my first custom-designed Moodle block -- that makes it very easy to put a link on a Moodle course directly to the related DrupalEd course/group. As with before, this uses the Moodle variable "Shortname" and corresponds that with the "URL Alias" in Drupal. Those have to correspond or this doesn't work. 

And if you are into learning how to make custom blocks in Moodle, this page of Block Documentation on the Moodle.org site was incredibly helpful and important, and I really just used their template.

In <site>/moodle/blocks, create a directory called drupal_link. Then create a file block_drupal_link.php -- here is that code:

Then, create a file called config_global.html -- this is what will allow you to have global settings for the block. The global setting we create here is the root of the drupaled site, so that it's the same for all courses. (You could make this editable, course by course, but I didn't want to because we only have one drupal site.) Here's that code:

Once you do this, you may need to go to main moodle admin page for moodle to recognize the block, but otherwise, you should see the block in the Administration -> Blocks page. Edit the Settings with the root of your DrupalEd install (include the trailing slash), and you should be able to just add the block to any course and have the link show up. It will show up as the name of the course, rather than the URL. I thought that looked prettier.

Also... one silly issue that I'm wondering about. For some reason, the Block name is enclosed in [[ ]] brackets. I don't know why. Any ideas?

Tags: moodle, killer app, drupal, killerapp, programming

[Be aware -- this is by FAR the geekiest post I've written in a long, long time.]

Thought I'd share this for anyone who is trying to use both Moodle and Drupal. We just figured out a quick way to create a link on a DrupalEd Group page to a corresponding Moodle course.

Here's how:

This assumes that a) you have CCK and Computed Field installed

First, give every DrupalEd course an automatic alias that is the same as your Moodle short-course name. (Yes, right now, we have to do that by hand. That needs to change eventually.)

Then, in Content Management -> Content Types -> Course -- create a new field called field_moodle_link (or something like that) and select Field Type -- Computed and create the field.

In the next page that pops up, fill in the Label with whatever you want the label to be on the Drupal Group page. Then I chose "Required" under data settings, but I'm not 100% sure that's necessary. And under Computed Code, enter this:

Make sure "Display this field" is checked, and I use this as my display format:

And then save it.

Once it's saved, click "Manage Fields" and make sure that your new field has a lower numerical value than the Highlighted Content Field, so that it's at the top of the Drupal page.

What I'd like to do eventually, is figure out how to make that link appear in the Group Details block, but I haven't figured out how to edit that. Anyone who knows, I'd love to know.

In the meantime, drop me a note if you find this useful... or make it better.

(And now, off to figure out Moodle blocks. And yes, I'm still a principal, why do you ask?)

Tags: killerapp, drupal, programming