The challenge teachers face in integrating their course work across the disciplines is often a matter of coming up with the right questions. At Brimmer & May School, the faculty uses Bloom’s theory of the six levels of cognition- knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation-as they design tasks for students. The result is assignments like this one from a
PROBLEM: Your skateboard is stuck under a dumpster. To get it out, you have a 4′ by 6′ sheet of plywood and a curb. You weigh 150 pounds. Can you lift the dumpster to get it out, and how? Faced with this question, students confront several of the Coalition’s nine common principles at once: they must take steps on their
For more information on the Essential Schools programs referred to in this issue, contact: Alternative Community School 111 Chestnut Street Ithaca, NY 14850 (607) 274-2183 Andover High School Andover, MA 01810 (617) 470-1707 Adelphi Academy 8515 Ridge Boulevard Brooklyn, NY 11209 (718) 238-3308 The Brimmer & May School 69 Middlesex Road Chestnut Hill, MA 02167 (617) 566-7462 Bronxville High School
It has become a truism in education that the classroom teacher is at the heart of effective school reform. In the Essential Schools movement, this takes the form of a commitment to personalized learning-the teacher as coach to no more than eighty students, rather than as deliverer of instructional services to a larger, continually changing group. In order to achieve
The schools and not the ed schools are the real training ground for teachers who would be generalists, says Theodore Sizer, who heads Brown University’s education department and the Coalition of Essential Schools. That “tough and realistic” assessment, he says, comes from a sense that the problems involved; are so immediate that “we can’t wait for them to be solved