Thursday, April 25, 2013

Teaching Students About Trade-Offs - Bridging Differences - Education Week

Teaching Students About Trade-Offs - Bridging Differences - Education Week:


Teaching Students About Trade-Offs

Dear Elliott,
You remind me of what always gives me hope—about myself and the world! We are insatiably inclined to learn from our experience—although too often we do less and less of it as we grow older.
Schools have the unique potential of being conscious places for thinking aloud together—across ages and different histories. They are the heart—potentially—of the answer to "how best to teach teachers." Bringing faculties, K-12 teachers, parents, and students together to genuinely reexamine their ideas, over and over—daily, weekly, annually, etc.—is the untapped resource that can change the world. And schools are where it can happen.
I overstate my case. But it was precisely this that made our mutual friend Emily excited about "comparing" Mission Hill and the KIPP school you were so long associated with in Houston: the liveliness of the staff's