Faces of Learning E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 191

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Inspirational stories of engaging, real-life educational experiences Everyone has a personal learning story, a time when they became actively engaged in their own education. Maybe it was an especially challenging teacher, or a uniquely supportive environment, or a collaborative classroom. In Faces of Learning, both well-known public figures, such as Arne Duncan and Al Franken, and ordinary Americans recall the moments when they truly learned something. * Includes stories from people of all different backgrounds and from all over the country * The stories are grouped into categories by theme like "relevant" and "experiential" to help reveal the common characteristics of what works in education * Each chapter ends with five things you can do to improve your own learning, that of your students, and of all Americans Readers can visit the companion website www.facesoflearning.net to share their own stories of educational success and find out what else they can do.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

Chapter One: Challenging

Jenna Fournel

Mark Rockeymoore

Jan Resseger

Gloria Ladson-Billings

Loretta Goodwin

Bruce Deitrick Price

Arne Duncan

Angela Valenzuela

Carl Glickman

Andrew Margon

Challenging: Five Things You Can Do

Chapter Two: Engaging

Renee Moore

Amy Estersohn

Maritza Brito

Kevin McCann

Margaret Owens

Larry Myatt

John Goodlad

Sitembiso Ncube Maduma

Elijah Cummings

Jill Vialet

Engaging: Five Things You Can Do

Chapter Three: Supportive

Al Franken

Jenifer Fox

Michelle Durange

Zainab Ali

Susan Oliver

Gary Cohen

Chantale Soekhoe

Emily Gasoi

Cassandra Carland

Carrie A. Rogers

Supportive: Five Things You Can Do

Chapter Four: Relevant

R. Dwayne Betts

Robert McLaughlin

Deborah Meier

Jamal Fields

Jenerra Williams

Patrick Ip

Gerlma A. Johnson

Anonymous

Ahniwake Rose

James Comer

Relevant: Five Things You Can Do

Chapter Five: Experiential

Joel Elliott

Terry Pickeral

Elizabeth Rogers

Steve Moore

Jill Davidson

Rachel Barnes

Stedman Graham

Stephen Vick

Liz Lerman

Maya Soetoro-Ng

Experiential: Five Things You Can Do

Epilogue

Ted Sizer 1932–2009

About the Editor

Sam Chaltain

About the Campaign

Acknowledgments

Photo Credits

Copyright © 2011 by The Forum for Education and Democracy. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Faces of learning : 50 powerful stories of defi ning moments in education / [edited by] Sam Chaltain.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-470-91014-6 (hardback)

1. Education—United States—Anecdotes. I. Chaltain, Sam. LA23.F34 2011

370.973—dc22

2010045658

For our teachers

Inspiration, hunger: these are the qualities that drive good schools. The best we educational planners can do is to create the most likely conditions for them to flourish, and then get out of their way.

—Ted Sizer

Introduction

This is a book of different people's stories.

Some are about teachers who changed their students’ lives. Some describe the moment when a person first discovered how to ask the right questions, or found what they were most passionate about. Others are about making art, or going on a challenging hike, or studying everything from Morse code to Macbeth to kung fu. But all of the stories in this collection are about one central thing—learning— and what it feels like to discover one's purpose, passion, and capacity for greatness.

The fifty stories gathered here were submitted, along with hundreds of others, as part of a national grassroots effort to change the tenor of our national conversation about schooling by shifting it from a culture of testing—in which we overvalue basic-skills reading and math scores and undervalue just about everything else—to a culture of learning, in which we restore our collective focus on the core conditions of a powerful learning environment. Our goal is to help people define what makes for powerful learning experiences, and work backward from there to decide how best to evaluate and improve our schools, our educators, and the progress of our nation's schoolchildren.

In sharing their stories, our authors—who range from students to social workers to the Secretary of Education himself—were responding to one of two simple prompts:

1. What was your most powerful personal experience in a learning community—regardless of whether that experience took place inside or outside of school?

2. Who was your most effective teacher, and what was it about that person that made him or her so effective?

The purpose in asking these questions was twofold: first, to give people an opportunity to reflect on what they already know to be true about powerful learning and teaching (rather than telling them what some “expert” thinks it is); and, second, to use the insights from these stories to help people see more clearly what a powerful learning environment actually looks like—and what it requires.

Based on those insights, the stories in this book are divided into five sections: Challenging, Engaging, Supportive, Relevant, and Experiential. As you read them, you'll see that most of the stories could have been listed in several categories. I hope you'll also imagine how the insights they provide can be used to strengthen the learning cultures of the schools in your neighborhood. Rather than viewing each story as a “best practice” that should be replicated and scaled up, I encourage you to think instead of how these authors’ collective wisdom clarifies a “best question” we should ask whenever we want to improve our schools: How can we make schools that are more challenging, engaging, supportive, relevant, and experiential?

Now, more than ever, our country needs these sorts of schools. Unlike any other pillar of our society, public education is the only institution that reaches 90 percent of every new generation, is governed by public authority, and was founded with the explicit mission of preparing young people to be thoughtful and active participants in a democratic society. And, as these stories illuminate, the good news is that the business of improving our schools doesn't need to be a tiresome, desperate, and futile task; it can be a collaborative, risky, and deeply fulfilling journey that results in us better understanding ourselves—and each other.

I hope you enjoy the stories that follow. Consider putting some of the recommendations we provide at the end of each chapter into action in your life and in your community. And please take the time to share your own story, and read the stories of others at www.facesoflearning.net.

Chapter One

A summer art class. The United States Army. The halls of an urban elementary school. A colored high school in Apartheid-era South Africa. The streets of Philadelphia. A church basement. And three separate classrooms where it was impossible to hide.

As these stories remind us, the best learning experiences are never the easy ones. It's only when we're challenged beyond our usual limits that we have the possibility of discovering something new about ourselves, each other, and the larger world.