The Croton-Harmon school district belongs to New York’s Compact for Learning, a group of innovative schools that share common goals reflecting Essential School principles. To chart progress toward these goals up and down the pathway, Superintendent Sherry King devised a “system map” whose columns tracked the ways in which local initiatives (both current and planned), data, and the district’s decisions
Elementary School Networks(NESN) began in the spring of 1993 when educators and parents from 18 states gathered in New York to consider how Essential School principles relate to elementary schools. Another key goal: to form local and regional school-based “networks” through which to collaborate in reform efforts. With support from the DeWitt Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund, in 1994 the project
When the same principles guide a student’s school experience from kindergarten through high school and beyond, the habits of learning take a far deeper hold. But this entails teachers, parents, and administrators working and talking together on every subject and at every step. A HELIUM BALLOON PROJECT from Kristin Munro-Leighton’s fourth-grade year at Louisville’s Brown School has kept floating into
In a working paper from the Atlas project’s offices in Newton, Massachusetts, Linda Gerstle offers these observations on how K-12 pathways can enhance conditions for meaningful innovation: They generate consensus on a common philosophy of teaching and learning that transcends grade levels. They establish a district vision of what is possible and desired as student outcomes. They coordinate community assets
The Croton-Harmon school district in Croton-on-Hudson New York found portfolio assessment to be a useful way to tie together curriculum and instruction across its elementary school, middle school, and high school. The following diagram outlines the projects portrayed in each student’s “digital portfolio”; the categories in bold indicate areas emphasized throughout every level. The High School Portfolio(grades 9-11) Skill: problem
To get teachers across the district thinking in new ways whatever their grade level or discipline, the Gorham Atlas community brought 36 of them from six schools together in a Summer Institute last year. One hundred thirty-five students from kindergarten through grade eleven attended the Institute every morning for two weeks; assigned to one of nine multi-age groups, they provided
The school pathway creates a personalized learning environment that spans a student’s educational career. One high school and all(or a selected group) of the schools that feed into it, from pre-school on, form an academic community that works together to set standards and establish guidelines for coherent teaching, learning, and assessment across the pathway. Teachers across the pathway know each