Authenticity in Education |
Blog
Reading Materials
May, 2016
Transforming SchoolsBob Lenz uses this book to highlight the success that the Envision Schools in the San Fransisco Bay area has had with non-traditional education for underprivileged students. Lenz is able to not only describe the Schools' educational model, but to also provide in depth examples and illustrations of the models in action.
Mark Phillips of Edutopia claims that "If every administrator and teacher leader in this country were to read this and apply most of it in their schools, education [as a whole] would be improved greatly." |
Personalizing 21st Century Education: A Framework for Student SuccessWritten by Dan Domench, Morton Sherman, and John L. Brown, this book questions what it means to be a student in the 21st century. In a world where technology allows for an unprecedented global interconnectedness it is more important than ever for every student to remain engaged and challenged by their education, but the question remains: How?
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Leaving to LearnElliot Washor and Charles Mojkowski discuss the relation between the relative success in out-of-school learning situations, student engagement levels, and high school drop out rates. They pose introspective questions throughout the book, such as why students disengage from traditional learning or what constitutes educational success, in order to explain the current situation and motivate readers to act.
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A New Take on Higher Education
October, 2015
The Minerva Project explores a new platform of higher education. By combining traditional college, online education and experiential learning through travel the school is able to create an entirely new system of learning. In an interview with the Huffington Post, CEO of the Minerva Project Ben Nelson discusses how the professors "actively and regularly engage in conversation that works toward the design and delivery of the best possible curriculum". The project allows students to study in seven different cities throughout the course of their four year undergraduate degree while living in semi-traditional dorms with fellow students. Student teacher interaction is entirely online through group video-chatting.
21st Century Educating
January, 2015
To grow up in the twenty-first century means to grow up with the world at your fingertips. It seems like every child in America knows how to swipe through photos on an iPhone or tablet with more ease than they hold a physical photograph. Thus, to force the children who have such active minds and (apparently) short attention spans to sit still in a white-walled classroom while being lectured at seems as if it would be more counter active than active. Hackschooling is one of the first hands-on approaches to tackle this problem. As can be seen in Logan LaPlante's 2013 Tedx Talk, Hackschooling is working not only to teach students in a new, more interactive way, but is also attempting to bring the joy and excitement back into learning.
Quitting the Assembly Line
January, 2015
Rhode Island public school teacher S. Round decided to leave his teaching position of 13 years after becoming so discontented with the school system that he felt he had no other choice. He discusses the damaging effects that the "one size fits all," or assembly line, type education that is so common in public schools can have on the students. The comments section of the video on Youtube is simply a collection of praises for Round. Since leaving the public school system Round and his wife have founded Print Inverted Reading and Writing in order to provide free lessons in reading and writing to dyslexic students.