Description

The Prompts, Modules & Courses are all professional learning activities aimed at supporting teachers and teacher leaders and other leaders in classroom or school transformation through Arts Integration and Character Development.

The Prompts are quite short and usually address only a small segment of an initiative, but they build.

An important part of that building process is the collaborative development of lessons and units.  It is not possible to over-emphasize the benefits of working collaboratively, with a partner or a team.  Doing the Prompts with at least one other educator, someone with whom you are developing lessons or units, will more than double the benefit.

The Prompts, Modules & Courses are all organized around the following outline, with School Transformation / Invitational Education forming the overall idea and goal, supported, in this case by Arts Integration and Character Development.  There are other possible supporting initiatives, but this website focuses on the two which in my experience are the most important and powerful, and, interestingly, have become seriously underemphasized in the era of high-stakes accountability.  Please keep in mind I have paranoid tendencies and feel a large and influential segment of the American power structure favors privitazition of public schools and therefore seeks ways to weaken them, while pretenting to strengthen simplistic notions of accountability.

So, the power of the arts to teach other subjects and interdisciplinary understandings, and for their own sake, and the power of character education, also as an end in itself and as an essential tool in creating good learning environments and in encouraging intrinsic motivation to learn and improve one's self.....these are the points of emphasis on this website, for school transformation.

OUTLINE:

School Transformation
- Invitational Education
- Systems Thinking
- Professional Learning Communities
- Effective Schools Research

Arts Integration
- The use of the arts
- Learning with and through the arts
- Collaboration
- Art Appreciation

Character Education
- Mutual Synergy of Character Development & Academic Achievement

Prompts For Teachers & Teams

Storytelling

Mindsets / Mental Models - Systems Thinking

Systems Thinking - 5 ps - Critical Thinking / Creative Problem-Solving

Show portion of movie 'Midnight in Paris' when Adriana decides to stay in La Bell Epoch (1890) to design ballet costumes and Gil observes that everyone might prefer a time other than their present.

Power Standards / 80/20 Curriculum Doug Reeves (2008) uses his research on the degree of implementation of school reform efforts to highlight what he calls "the myth of linearity." This belief, one that Reeves argues is accepted by most would-be education reformers, is that greater implementation leads to greater student achievement in a linear fashion. That is, if we implement a particular research-based reform a little, we will see a little improvement in student achievement. If we implement the reform to a moderate degree, we can expect a moderate increase in student achievement, and if we invest in extensive implementation, we will be rewarded with a substantial increase in achievement. Unfortunately, this may be a myth. Instead, Reeves's research shows that the relationship between degree of implementation and student achievement is nonlinear. In other words, for many initiatives, we shouldn't expect to see any change in student achievement until we get to extensive implementation.