In prepping for the workshop tonight I’ve: gone over a mental picture of everyone and their names; written out a handful of review questions covering the biggest conceptual lessons we learned in the last session; settled on a schedule with the group facilitator to accommodate a short dinner, birthday celebrations Read more…
Phew! Now that that‘s out of the way, I can get around to some other things that I wanted to write about. The brouhaha surrounding teacher evaluations here in NYC depresses me, so I wanted to pick out a nice little nugget from an opinion piece submitted to the Times Read more…
Let’s talk about pilot programs! As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’m piloting bits of my Coming of Age program at New Alternatives for Children (NAC). I’m especially excited about the upcoming workshop, which will allow participants to take what we discussed in our last meeting—coming of age rituals—and synthesize it for themselves by designing rites of passage that resonate with their personal definitions of adulthood. As opposed to the last session, where I needed to hit several conceptual points in a presentation and discussion, this is the part of the program where I have no agenda and no expectations. I’m not familiar with this group, but even the facilitator who knows them well is curious to see what the youths come up with. After the presentations, we will have everyone fill out another survey that will hopefully give us a measure the impact of the workshop and allow them to evaluate my role as an educator.
The group facilitator and I debated whether or not we should have participants fill out post-workshop evaluations so soon. (more…)
Yesterday I debuted my Rites of Passage workshop at New Alternatives for Children (NAC). I expected a lot of awkward silence, but there were so many talkative and knowledgeable people in the room, and many of their questions and comments pushed me in exactly the right direction. I have a lot to process, but I’ll offer some initial observations here: (more…)
I am still making my way through the Teagle anthology on assessment, which I can’t recommend nearly enough to educators who are invested in bettering their teaching practice. Today I read “Fearful Symmetries: Rubrics and Assessment” by Sarah Webster Goodwin. You might be able to tell from her title that Goodwin is a scholar of British Romanticism, and her approach to education owes a lot to Blake’s notion of poetic or prophetic learning, which goes beyond what is known and taps into something (you guessed it) sublime or ineffable. The most engrossing part of her article detailed a particularly novel project assignment she handed a freshman class in Skidmore’s interdisciplinary Human Dilemmas seminar. (more…)
Over the holidays I attended the MLA Convention, and in a panel on student assessment we were all reminded that educators and institutions shouldn’t worry as much about the quality of students they get, but the quality of the students that exit our classrooms.
You know how you read an idea that catches your attention and suddenly it’s everywhere? That’s how it’s been these past couple of weeks after reading William Bridges’s ideas on the effects of industrialization on work. In an earlier post I summarize his argument that what we define today as a “job” is an relatively recent artifact of the industrial revolution, which fundamentally changed our relationship to work by parceling it out as very specific tasks through the division of labor, and training workers to perform those same tasks mechanically day after day, according to the rhythm of the factory clock, rather than the needs of the moment or the season. Since this past weekend, I’ve encountered this idea twice more in relation to work and education. (more…)
I just came back from visiting family in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where a relative informed me that her eighteen year old daughter has been taking an elective called “Initiative Ed” at her public high school. Her eldest son had taken it when he was a senior and recommended Read more…
The short answer: have your students set their own rules, codify and display them on a piece of poster board, and hold them to those rules. No matter how rude and rowdy they seem, once they get to a certain age, students know how they should be behaving. If you Read more…
Although I’ve experienced the impact of No Child Left Behind on my students’ approach to learning, I haven’t spent any time writing about it because the criticisms leveled against it are widely known even to the general public and I didn’t want to rehearse tired catch-phrases like “teaching to the Read more…