Voice of SD Article

The article:

Setting the rules is part of schoolwork at Innovations Academy, an unconventional K-8 charter school with roughly 200 students that practices what it calls "positive discipline." Children handle disputes together instead of running to the principal. They create rules adults might not agree with. The idea is children will become more independent, cooperative and thoughtful instead of merely compliant, learning the how and why of following the rules.

A parent write up is here as well.

Enjoy,

Danielle

What makes a great teacher?

At IA we're constantly inquiring into our practice. What's working for our students and families? What's working for our teachers? How can we make this more engaging? What are we missing?

It appears that this type of inquiry is one trait of a great teacher as reported in "The Atlantic." Over the last month, myself and Christine have read some great articles espousing the greatness of what our teachers are already doing: building relationships with students, reflecting on their work, endless planning and reworking, etc.

What's humorous to us is that even some district officials are coming out and talking about relationship based classrooms and more positive discipline...so where's the implementation? We know that it has to come from top down and it's going to be very difficult to implement reflection and personal freedom when a system is built on a dominating hierarchy.

They'll have to come visit IA and start training with us.

The excerpt below from The Atlantic is a slice of how our teachers and staff operate:

[G]reat teachers tended to set big goals for their students. They were also perpetually looking for ways to improve their effectiveness. For example, when Farr called up teachers who were making remarkable gains and asked to visit their classrooms, he noticed he’d get a similar response from all of them: “They’d say, ‘You’re welcome to come, but I have to warn you—I am in the middle of just blowing up my classroom structure and changing my reading workshop because I think it’s not working as well as it could.’ When you hear that over and over, and you don’t hear that from other teachers, you start to form a hypothesis.” Great teachers, he concluded, constantly reevaluate what they are doing.

Superstar teachers had four other tendencies in common: they avidly recruited students and their families into the process; they maintained focus, ensuring that everything they did contributed to student learning; they planned exhaustively and purposefully—for the next day or the year ahead—by working backward from the desired outcome; and they worked relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls.

We'd love to hear from you in the comment section. What do you think makes a great teacher?

Raffle this Thursday!

Hello IA Families,

Thursday is Family Night and we're having a big raffle. Buy tickets this week with Donna or Karrlie and possibly win one of the prizes below on Thursday:

















































And more!

Another Great Video: Capable Kids

http://www.ted.com/talks/kiran_bir_sethi_teaches_kids_to_take_charge.html

Excellent Video: Pediatric Neurologist gives his take on education

While we don't identify as Montessori, what he's discussing here rings true for IA.

Nurturing Empathy

The capacity for empathy seems to be innate, but parents can encourage it in children by teaching them to relate positively to others and by modeling it themselves.

Playing to Learn

Here is a great piece that speaks volumes to what we're doing at IA:

In our theoretical classroom, children would also spend a short period of time each day practicing computation — adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing. Once children are proficient in those basics they would be free to turn to other activities that are equally essential for math and science: devising original experiments, observing the natural world and counting things, whether they be words, events or people. These are all activities children naturally love, if given a chance to do them in a genuine way.

What they shouldn’t do is spend tedious hours learning isolated mathematical formulas or memorizing sheets of science facts that are unlikely to matter much in the long run. Scientists know that children learn best by putting experiences together in new ways. They construct knowledge; they don’t swallow it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/opinion/02engel.html