SLA (and I) are featured as the Video of the Week on ScholasticAdministrator.com. They really did a nice job of capturing a sense of the school in a four minute video!
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Tags: SLA, ScholasticAdministrator
A View From the Schoolhouse
SLA (and I) are featured as the Video of the Week on ScholasticAdministrator.com. They really did a nice job of capturing a sense of the school in a four minute video!
Tags: SLA, ScholasticAdministrator
Science Leadership Academy is featured (along with High Tech High and New Tech High and Gary Stager and Jane Krauss, nice company!) in this month’s Scholastic Administrator Magazine in The Power of Project Learning — an article about project-based learning. In addition to some cool shots of Gamal Sherif and Matt VanKouwenberg (and a nifty one of me, I admit), there are some great quotes such as:
Sometimes the results surprise both the teacher and learner, says Zachary Chase, an English teacher at SLA. To learn about the oral tradition associated with Homers The Odyssey, students were charged with finding a family story, getting a first-person recording of the story, and preserving it to pass onto their children. When one student found a bunch of letters from an uncle who had left his family to go to California during the Gold Rush, he used GarageBand to record himself reading the letters. He altered the voice to make it sound like that of an older man, Chase says. This project not only outstripped the teachers demands, but the success of the final project even surprised the student, he adds.
But be sure to read the whole article.
I just wrote a piece for the Anytime, Anywhere Learning Foundation all about the SLA – TFI partnership. Here’s a sample:
At Science Leadership Academy, we have been incredibly fortunate to have a deep and meaningful partnership with The Franklin Institute — one of the oldest and most prestigious science and technology museums in the country. This partnership is unique in many ways, not the least of which is that the school was planned as a partnership school, in fact, my office was housed within the walls of The Franklin Institute (TFI)during our planning year. This gave us the opportunity to build many aspects of the school with the partnership in mind. In the end, the partnership in mind — from the way the schedule works, to the hands-on pedagogy– matched the philosophy of TFI itself. And in everything we did, we felt it was very important that the partnership was a true synergy — one where both partners were enriched by the interaction. Too often, school-community partnerships fail because they are viewed not as a true partnership, but as a hand out or a public relations moment. With this in mind, as a founding blueprint, we framed partnership in three ways: Shared Public Vision; Shared Pedagogical Vision and The Interaction of the Two Communities. This is a framework we still use today.
The whole article is here. I’m hoping it’s a useful frame for how school partnerships can be successful.