Twenty-First Century Schools Committee

After our Vision Committee meeting today, I was reading a blog, think:lab, that I frequently check out, and ran across something I had to share.

Christian Long, who writes Think Lab, is preparing to interview Daniel Pink tomorrow and was soliciting questions on his blog to ask during the interview.  

One of his responses came from a 17 year old blogger, who had this excellent list of questions for Daniel Pink.  His questions resonate with so much of we have been talking about and are explained so beautifully by this high school student who has obviously put a great deal of thought into what schools of the future would be like.

It was one of those moments online when I just get chills thinking about the opportunities that web tools like blogs provide all of us in terms of sharing ideas across space and place.

As a followup to the post about the Spanish immersion program, I ran across this tidbit on Fischbowl about a school district in the Denver area.

“Beginning next fall, Douglas County Schools will begin implementing a K-12 World Languages program. . . . The basic idea is that students will receive instruction in a particular world language for every one of the thirteen years they are in Douglas County Schools, with the stated goal that every graduate from a Douglas County high school will be proficient in reading, writing and speaking a second language (in addition to English).”

Karl Fisch goes on to talk about how this will be delivered to students (teachers will learn languages along with students) and comments,

“So, the question for my school district is, “Are we looking at something like this?  In a flat world, in a globally interconnected economy, in a 24/7/365 business cycle, in a world where understanding all the people and all the cultures of the world is terribly important for economic, political and social reasons – our students need this.”

Food for thought for our committee?

There is an interesting conversation running among several blogs the last couple of days on teaching, the structure of schools, and what types of assessments we do.

It’s interesting reading.

A few of the links:

David Jakes’ blog comments on “covering content.”

http://jakespeak.blogspot.com/2007/01/aerial-photographs-coverage-and.html

 He links to Wes Fryer’s blog on assessment and the structure of schools:

http://www.speedofcreativity.org/2007/01/17/assess-schools-on-a-happiness-and-engagement-index/

Some hard questions….

Architects Prakash Nair and Randall Fielding focus their work on physical school design to reflect good practices in schools and have many articles about this on their site, DesignShare.com as well as on their firm’s webpage.

Randall Fielding challenges us to think outside the box in designing schools to reflect a different model for teaching (a model that is a cross between Da Vinci’s studio, Einstein’s studio, and chef Jamie Oliver’s cooking studio!) in this excellent article that was published in Edutopia.

This fascinating commentary by Fielding’s colleague, Prakash Nair, about how school design needs to look at new models of education that are more “whole person” and Eastern was interesting to me in light of some of the conversations about the personal aspects of student learning we’ve had.

I’d be interested to hear your thoughts about their ideas.   More food for thought! 

Carolyn