We invite you to participate in ASCD's third annual Whole Child Virtual Conference. Entitled "Moving from Implementation to Sustainability to Culture," sessions will offer educators around the globe leadership discussions and strategies to support their work to implement and sustain a whole child approach to education.
The Finnish Experience and the Whole Child
10:00–11:00 a.m. eastern timePresenter: Pasi Sahlberg, director general, Centre for International Mobility and Cooperation, Helsinki, Finland
In many parts of the world, public schooling is in crisis. Competition, choice, standardized testing, and privatization have become common tactics to improve schools. This presentation shows that there is an alternative way to transform education systems and boost learning for all students. It is the way of inclusion and equity, teacher professionalism, collaborative practice, and trust-based responsibility. Finland's education system consistently ranks among the top in the world in learning achievement, equity of outcomes, and system efficiency. This presentation reveals that the transformation of education systems is possible if education policies focus more on the whole child instead of academic performance, professional development instead of test-based accountability, and pedagogy instead of technology. What is needed is the right blend of ingenuity, time, patience, and determination.
Vision in Action: The ASCD Whole Child Award—A Retrospective
12:00–1:00 p.m. eastern timePanel Discussion
Educators at schools chosen to receive theVision in Action: The ASCD Whole Child Awardhave taken specific steps and produced exceptional results at their schools to ensure that students from all backgrounds are healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged. Join administrators and staff from past ASCD award-winning schools as they share what steps they took and continue to take to ensure their students are healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged. The Panel members include
- Iha Farquhar, community school coordinator, Byrne Creek Secondary, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada;
- Clare Struck, guidance counselor, Malcolm Price Laboratory School, Cedar Falls, Iowa; and
- Barbara Yeatman, curriculum facilitator, Quest Early College High School, Houston, Tex.
High Performance and How to Get It: The Global Fourth Way of Educational Change
2:00–3:00 p.m. eastern timePresenter: Andy Hargreaves, Thomas More Brennan Chair, Lynch School of Education, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Mass.
Educators in many high-performing countries and systems are reexamining their structures and policies to move toward greater collective professional autonomy from bureaucratic control, stronger active involvement of local communities, and diversified teaching to respond to today's widely varying populations of learners. Learn about this fourth way of education reform that heralds the next stage for education improvement—a movement that reverts education authority back from centralized bureaucracies to educators and communities, diversifies skills and content taught to suit each community and context, and is driven by the inspiring and also basic belief that there are skills and aptitudes that are just as critical as content knowledge.
ASCD's Whole Child Network: Putting It Into Practice
4:00–5:00 p.m. eastern timePresenter: Donna Snyder, manager of Whole Child Programs, ASCD
In May 2012, ASCD selected a group of schools from across the continental United States and Guam to become part of the ASCD Whole Child Network. The schools are committed to a three-year, comprehensive school improvement process using the tenets of the Whole Child Initiative—healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged—and their indicators (PDF) as a sustainable whole child approach to educating their students. Join Donna Snyder, manager of Whole Child Programs at ASCD, as she outlines the aims, process and even some first-year outcomes of the network.