As I mentioned previously, Wendy Kopp and Bob Wise were on Charlie Rose last week. The whole show in now available for viewing online. (If you are only interested in listening to Charlie’s conversation with Bob Wise, skip to minute 36). Make sure to check out the lively comment section on the show’s website as well.
Dave Eggers’ Wish Blog
In Case You Missed It…
Monday, July 7th, 2008A TED Table at 826NYC
Tuesday, July 1st, 2008At the event on Thursday three TEDsters sponsored chairs: Tom Reilly, Cyndi Stivers, and Amy Novogratz. If one more person sponsors a chair, we will have a TED table-full of chairs. Each chair is $110. Each sponsor also gets to decide what is inscribed on the bottom of the chair. If you are interested in sponsoring a chair, contact Jennifer at jennifer [@] 826nyc [dot] org.
Below is a longer sponsorship form that details 826NYC’s programs and the possibilities for contributing. The Summer Filmmakers workshop is about to get underway and they really need another camera to help students make amazing films. The workshop culminates in a premier screening at BAM. It’s a very exciting program and they’d love TEDsters help with it.
An 826/TED Field Trip
Monday, June 30th, 2008Last Thursday we held our first 826/TED Field Trip in Brooklyn. Modeled after the field trips 826 holds for school kids (but with snacks and adult drinks!), the evening was an overwhelming success.
There were capes for one and all.
John Hodgman and Sarah Vowell were there to tell guests about the great work of 826NYC.
826NYC volunteers helped us write a short story about an Icelandic leprechaun.
And the TEDsters made great pledges to participate in their local public schools and tell their story on Once Upon a School.
Photo credit: Joe Pacheco
What to Watch in July
Monday, June 30th, 2008
TV may be bad for kids. But it doesn’t have to be so for parents.
Here are a couple of things to check out in July:
On July 1, Charlie Rose will be spend an hour discussing education with Bob Wise, President of Alliance for Excellent Education, and Wendy Kopp, founder and President of Teach for America.
Throughout the month, HBO will be playing their new documentary Hard Times at Douglass High: A No Child Left Behind Report Card, a study of one year at a Baltimore high school. The film documents the daily struggles and victories of the students and their teachers, with the backdrop of NCLB and the consequences on the school of these and other policies. After watching the film, check out this post on Eduwonk’s blog for another perspective on the school and NCLB.
Photo credit: Daniel Horacio Agostini
Assessing Your Community
Friday, June 27th, 2008Dave Eggers wish is premised on the idea that communities should be involved in their local public schools. His dream is on a micro-level. That individuals will choose to impact the lives of students by offering their talent and time.
The Public Education Network just released its Civic Index for Quality Public Education tool which considers this idea on a macro-level. The tool, to be used by community-based organizations, assesses the strengths and weakness of the community related to public education. It reflects the conditions outside a school which help create successful students and a successful school system.
The Index identifies 10 categories by which a community can assess their involvement in public education:
- Education leadership of local elected officials
- Commitment to the values of tolerance and inclusiveness
- Active parents
- Strong civic organizations (parent, philanthropic, civic/religious organizations)
- Utilization of school performance data to improve school quality
- Youth involvement
- Partnerships with higher education
- Knowledge of, and voting for, the school board
- An active business community
- Media coverage
“Research and public opinion polling shows that the public believes every person, and every group in a community, is responsible for making sure every child receives a quality public education. Once individuals and groups in a community know how much they are doing to support public education, along with what they are doing right and what they could do better, they can do the right kind of work that will make a significant and measurable difference in the quality of their public schools.”
Making Music
Monday, June 23rd, 2008
Music education has been the unfortunate casualty of budget cuts in public schools across America. Even though studies have shown that participating in musical endeavors provides students with skills and experiences well beyond the music itself, including team work, discipline, personal fulfillment, and creative problem solving, these programs still remain one of the first to go when financial crises arise.
There are a variety of efforts to promote music in schools; one in particular was highlighted in Sunday’s New York Times. The Academy – a program of Carnegie Hall, the Juilliard School and the Weill Music Institute (the institute being an arm of Carnegie) – selects fellows from leading music schools to receive high-level coaching and lessons, as well as participating in concerts at Carnegie Hall and master classes, in exchange for committing to teaching at a New York public school one and a half days a week. The program remains small, with 34 fellow at the present time, and is still going through the pains with which any new program must deal. However it is an ambitious program striving to create professional musicians who will grow outside of their chosen profession and to boost music education. As described by the executive and artistic director of Carnegie Hall, Clive Gillinson, “We’re looking at the life of the musician of the future, what it could be and what it will be. If we can enable musicians to become utterly fulfilled, they will end up contributing far more to society and to music.”
The article on Sunday followed one musician, Alana Vegter, a French horn player at Julliard, and her experience working with the music teacher Ms. McDevitt at Ditmas Junior High School in Brooklyn. It was a difficult year, but proved to achieve many of the goals set forth by the academy.
Ms. Vegter says she learned many lessons through her experience: “how to be more patient, how to communicate better, how important a little focus can be for attention-starved children…She acknowledged another surprising result, that ‘sharing what I love with other people sometimes is more satisfying than playing.’ After a concert, she said, the connection with the audience is broken. ‘With kids it’s sustained,’ she added. ‘It’s one thing I’m doing in the world that makes me feel like I’m making a difference.’”
What’s the best thing about being Sir Ken Robinson?
Friday, June 20th, 2008From the TED blog…
This week, Sir Ken Robinson was awarded the Benjamin Franklin Medal by the UK’s RSA (the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce). At the ceremony, he gave a lecture on education and creativity — followed by a lively Q&A where he made several new and bold suggestions. You can download audio of the lecture and Q&A; the RSA plans to post video as well. (After listening to Sir Ken’s Q&A, blogger Tim Stahmer from Assorted Stuff makes the call: Sir Ken for Secretary of Education.)
And thanks to Ewan McIntosh’s edu.blogs.com for this: Student reporters from the Radiowaves project caught up with Sir Ken Robinson at the London International Music Show last week and shot this video interview with him, followed by commentary by the young interviewers on what education and music mean to them >>
Poetry as a Connection to Culture
Thursday, June 19th, 2008Sometimes it seems like the only encounter a person has with a poem is in school. And often it is through dissecting the poem, word by word, line by line, to find its meaning. While a worthwhile and important pursuit, it can often leave students with the impression that poetry is boring and irrelevant to both their present and their future. But it doesn’t need to be that way.
The article “Young American Indians Find Their Voice in Poetry” from Tuesday’s New York Times explores how writing and performing poems is linking students at Santa Fe Indian School to their culture and themselves.
[the students] do not hail from the gritty urban surroundings that are often a breeding ground for slam poetry, where poets are judged on both performance and writing, their team is drawing national attention for its decidedly American Indian take on an art form that has grown increasingly popular with young people over the last decade…
“For the kids, spoken word is a reconnection with the oral tradition, a return to the origin of language, its sound, its music,” said Tim McLaughlin, a creative writing teacher at the school and the team’s coach.
The team will be competing at the Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam Festival in Washington, D.C. this summer.
Interested in pursuing a Spoken Word Club at your local school? Learn more about the festival and it sponsoring organization Youth Speaks.
The Match Game in Teaching
Tuesday, June 17th, 2008The job search process can often feel detached and removed from reality. Does a piece of paper that lists my professional accomplishments thus far really explain what I am capable of doing? Does a company’s job description accurately portray the qualities needed for a position? Is the system really putting the right people in the right jobs in the right companies?
Malcolm Gladwell addressed this “mismatch problem in the workplace” at this year’s New Yorker Conference. Through a series of examples, he develops an argument that most of the ways candidates are evaluated for a job rarely reflect on how the candidate will perform in the job. When it comes to teaching, currently schools require specific types of credentials from teachers in their system such as certain test scores or a Masters degree. But, he continues, there is no correlation between these credentials and teacher quality.
Whether you have a masters degree or not…makes absolutely no difference in how you perform at the task of relating to and teaching kids…in the name of trying to make a better decision we’re spending all this money and spending all this time and none of it is having any effect. In fact we are doing the very thing that actually defeats the cause of finding better teachers. What we should be doing is broadening the pool as much as possible to find as many of these people with this ineffable, elusive gift called being a good teacher but instead what we do is narrow the pool…
Do you think that Gladwell’s argument holds up in your experience? If this mismatch problem exists, how do we overcome it? How can you truly judge the teaching ability of an individual? Is a better model to have more apprenticeships or student teachers? So many questions. I would love to hear your answers.
Why We Need Community Involvement
Monday, June 16th, 2008Inspiring community involvement in public education is the essence of Once Upon a School. How do we get individuals, who on the surface have no responsibility for the school system, to get involved? Community members must realize that they are already involved (taxes anyone?) and have an additional interest in creating an educated citizenry and workforce. And most importantly, working with students is fun and emotionally satisfying for both adult and child alike.
There is something special about the relationship an outside individual has when working with a student. As 826 puts it:
the average students knows his teacher has to help with his schoolwork, and he knows his parents have to help. But there’s something very new and transformative about meeting a member of the community — a professional journalist, a radio disc jockey, a graduate student, an advertising copywriter, a software developer, a retired lawyer — and have that person give them 2-3 hours of undivided attention. Almost without exception, student achievement and understanding leaps when they are given this concentrated one-on-one attention. Teachers and parents love the help, and the students get to ask a hundred questions until they truly understand a concept.
Joesph Graves, Dean of University Studies and Professor of Biological Studies at North Carolina A&T State University, recently had an editorial on the Greensboro, NC’s news-record.com about how community can enhance local education. His piece details the many ways community can get involved (i.e. tutoring, donations of materials, donations of money). Most importantly, however, is that education should be revered and community members should be pushing to improve education in their district.
The all-state football and basketball players can count on receiving full scholarships to our top state universities, but what about the state chess champions? The state chess champion receives a one-time award from the N.C. Chess Association that isn’t more than $1,000. The University of Texas-Dallas dominates collegiate chess because it gives full scholarships to qualifying chess players. These are students who also major in high-demand mathematics and science areas. Why aren’t we in Guilford County looking to recognize our high achieving academic students in the same way?
Students aspire to be like people who they can see that society rewards. The more alternative careers we expose students to that involve cultivating their intellect, the more we will observe students pursuing those careers.
