Category: Blog
-
Health Lessons for Schools: How students can improve the health and learning conditions at their schools.
What would happen if students examined their school, homes and habits in the same way that doctors examined a patient? Could they start to identify and change things in their school and home environments that hinder their health and learning? Could they identify and change their own choices to improve their health and learning? Could…
-
Rethinking Learning: What lessons can after school programs teach our schools?
During the recent Maryland Out of School Time conference I got a chance to observe lessons from a variety of after school programs. These programs involved the participants in genuine STEM inquiry in ways that are still rare in the schools that I visit. Exercise and nutritional education that are missing from many schools are…
-
The High School Innovation Challenge, Warnock Foundation.
The next time you are at a stadium filled with cheering fans, imagine if our teams ran onto the field not to knock down their opponents, but to lift up their community. What if they came to tackle social problems, not quarterbacks? Would we cheer and wave in unison if our team helped our…
-
The Chief Eternal Optimist of Bronx County
Stephen Ritz introduces himself as the “Chief Eternal Optimist of Bronx County”. It’s a place that needs optimism. The Bronx is a tough neighborhood with high unemployment and the rumble of food insecurity. The New York City Coalition Against Hunger reported in December, 2013 that nearly 49 percent of Bronx children lived in a household…
-
STEM Learning in the Garden
Students can learn STEM by growing and studying in gardens STEM Learning in the Garden As teachers and administrators search for ways to improve student performance, they should look in the garden. Learning in the garden is real, alive and surprising. Here discoveries of “bugs!” and “worms!” are shouted out and children run to the…
-
Echoes into the Future
“I believe that education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.” -John Dewey, My Pedagogic Creed Spirits of Hopkins The auditorium at Benjamin Franklin High School is as dim and faded as the community that surrounds it. The wooden seats are draped with the heavy coats and protest signs…
-
Will Science Kill Us or Save Us?
Will Science Kill Us Or Save Us? The record so far is…Yes. Nice invention, da Vinci, but if the plane flies, how would you shoot it down? Great theory, Einstein, but how can we use it to make bombs that could destroy the world? Nice process, Haber, it can help produce food to quadruple the…
-
Recalculating: Missing the Off Ramp on the Road to Climate Change
Recalculating: Missing the Off Ramps on the Road to Global Warming My GPS left me after our first drive together. Her voice was so calm, mechanical and authoritative that I imagined her wearing a neatly pressed uniform inside my phone. “Turn left at the next exit.” She faltered in surprise when I continued down Main…
-
Questioning Energy Answers: The best speech I’ve heard this year.
Excerpted from a speech by Kelly Klinefelter Lee, a teacher at Benjamin Franklin High School on December 18th, 2013. She spoke to a group of students and citizens protesting the planned construction of the largest incinerator in the United States in a Baltimore neighborhood already among the most polluted areas in the country. You can…