Culture
- Partner with a team member.
- Pick with your a different video to watch or article to read.
- Open the observation tool on one computer and read through the tool.
- Watch or read together and complete the observation tool prompts.
How to Give Grades when you Know that Giving Grades is Wrong (Socol, 2019)
The Grittiest Kid I Ever Knew (Moran, 2014)
What Robert Kennedy Tells Us About Changing Schools (Socol, 2018)
What Happens When Students Control Their Own Education (Richmond in The Atlantic, 2014)
"Student performance on statewide assessments has long been uneven, and teachers and administrators know there is still significant work to be done. But test scores are just one indicator, and based on multiple other measures, including higher graduation and college-going rates, Freeman feels confident that student-centered learning is moving Pittsfield in the right direction."
Students Sing Praises of First High School Center (2019) - Charlottesville Daily Progress
"'Kircher and other students said their time at Center One has made transitioning back to their base schools more difficult. They enjoy the freedom at the center and not having their schedule dictated by bells.
“At my base school, I feel like we’re herded through halls like cattle,” he said.
"Kircher said his experience at Center One makes him feel more prepared for the transition to life after high school."
Teenage Brains (2011) - David Dobbs, National Geographic
"Excitement, novelty, risk, the company of peers. These traits may seem to add up to nothing more than doing foolish new stuff with friends. Look deeper, however, and you see that these traits that define adolescence make us more adaptive, both as individuals and as a species. That's doubtless why these traits, broadly defined, seem to show themselves in virtually all human cultures, modern or tribal. They may concentrate and express themselves more starkly in modern Western cultures, in which teens spend so much time with each other. But anthropologists have found that virtually all the world's cultures recognize adolescence as a distinct period in which adolescents prefer novelty, excitement, and peers. This near-universal recognition sinks the notion that it's a cultural construct."
Middle School Treehouses (2015) - Pam Moran
"They may float between being semi-adults and semi-children and are at times the most stable and fragile of people, but they are explorers of life – through relationships, humor, risk taking, movement, music, stories, design, technologies and community."
For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood ... and the Rest of Y'all Too (2017) - Chris Emdin (PBS link)
'“The narrative itself, it exotic-izes youth and positions them as automatically broken,” he says. “It falsely positions the teacher, oftentimes a white teacher, as hero.”'
Transactional Disability and the Classroom (2010) - Ira Socol
"The child who can not decode alphabetic text, Is she disabled? Must she be diagnosed? What if she can understand and work with any information given to her auditorily? There is nothing wrong with alphabetic text, or the child. But the transaction as defined by the "space" - the teacher handing her the book - is failing. Text-To-Speech software and audiobooks might change that space, and that failure may not exist."
Voice, Agency, Influence
(2017) - Josh St. Hill and A King's Story (2017-18) Charlottesville (VA) Daily Progress
"As these impressive actors played their roles and spoke in voices we hear so often, the audience found itself deeply in sympathy with the suffering and in empathy with the courage to fight."