Working toward a better way..

This last week was exhausting, the kind of exhausting that results in sleeping well. I will have to mark this summer as the summer of charter schools and deep thinking in general because I've had the amazing opportunity to work as a facilitator with several of them. The approach and goals of these schools vary but at the end of the day they all seek to educate kids in new, fair and innovative ways. They all want to change their corner of the educational world and so far they have all wanted to leverage the tools of today to build successful children who thrive in the 21st century. As for the last week, I've worked with Turning Point Learning Center's staff and it has been amazing for me. They are some really enthusiastic learners, the kind of learners we want our kids to be.

We sat down on Monday to write a "Magna Carta" of sorts to put down on paper the things they were already believing and doing. This process was opened up in a google document where other thinkers were invited to jump in and share their thinking. We started this process to find a way to document the things we felt were right about the learning environment that has been established in this small school in Kansas. The idea is that often we have teachers who do great things but when they leave the building, the great things they've begun die, dry up or are abandoned. My personal goal was to take a snapshot of what an effective, empowered and successful learning environment looks like and their goal was to push the envelop even further toward preparing learners for their futures.

On the final days of our time together we took the standards and put them on the whiteboard and then tried to deconstruct them and integrate them into a project based set of approaches that would motivate kids while leaving them the room to find their own ownership while doing them. We added projects, videos, podcasts, and wikis, blogs and publishing to the web among other things as ways of making and keeping the work relevant. The staff has been using these tools all along and wehat we began last week was to put a finer point to the rationale of the approaches and tools.

What made the process interesting and exciting for me was the inclusion of outside minds and points of view that these instructors invited to a process that was deeply personal to them. I know they will have an amzing year with kids next year and I know that lucky kids in Emporia Kansas and other kids world-wide who connect to them will be motivated to grow their thinking long after the experiences are over.

For more information about TPLC and their ideas about education, contact: Ginger Lewman an active member of classroom 2.0 gingerl@essdack.org