The following is a message from Jim Strickland, founder of ASCEND, on the Marysville ASCEND Mailing List. It is reposted here with permission from the author. I know I’ve shared this with you before, but I was again moved by this quote from John Dewey’s Creative Democracy — The Task Before Us, written in 1939 on… Read more Schools as “gift nurseries”
The following is a message from Jim Strickland, founder of ASCEND, on the Marysville ASCEND Mailing List. It is reposted here with permission from the author. I ran across this today in Dennis Littky’s The Big Picture: Over the course of three decades watching kids walk into my schools, I have decided that I want them… Read more The real goals of education…
The following is a message from Jim Strickland, founder of ASCEND, on the Marysville ASCEND Mailing List. It is reposted here with permission from the author. Here are a couple of very thought-provoking excerpts from Earl Kelley’s In Defense of Youth (1962) — highly recommended! They point the way towards some potential projects and experiments we could… Read more Earl Kelley on standards, grades, and student voice
This week I learned that I need to dive deeper into what trauma-informed pedagogy looks like. Last week was originally slated to be our Spring Break in NYC, but, of course, COVID-19 has completely changed the course of what is expected of us as educators in one of the hardest-hit cities in the world. Of… Read more [WDYL] Trauma-Informed Pedagogy
The following is a message from Jim Strickland, founder of ASCEND, on the Marysville ASCEND Mailing List. It is reposted here with permission from the author. I was thinking this morning about the basic assumptions about education and learning that we take for granted. Because these assumptions are considered “common sense”, we don’t even imagine… Read more Challenging basic assumptions
The ASCEND blog has long laid dormant. For me, it’s really been more of an outlying brain than anything else. That said, as I’ve sat in quarantine, I’ve had more time to consider what I need to do as a newly-minted educator in our surreal developing reality. At the end of Summer last year, I… Read more WDYL: An ASCEND Blog Update
Why In my life, I’ve had two transformational moments in education. The first was in fifth grade, where I was given the power to leverage my curiosity through self-directed learning and technology. The second was in high school, when I entered the International School of Communications (affectionately known as the ISC). The experiences I had… Read more What Did You Learn Manifesto
“How” Trees In response to my last post, I’ve also been considering the best way to transform purposes and visions into tangible roadmaps. Organizations I’ve observed often do a poor job of scoping their goals, and do an even worse job articulating their purpose. Is there some process that can help organizations ensure that they… Read more How Trees
Philosophy drives education, so it’s important that we ask ourselves unanswerable, philosophical questions from time to time. Let’s start with this one: What is the purpose of education? Of course, there is no single answer to this question. Education serves many purposes, and these purposes will continue to evolve for a multitude of reasons. The reason… Read more The Purpose of Education
I was recently listening to Hidden Brain, and came across an episode about a metaphor from Alison Gopnik’s book, The Gardener and the Carpenter. The metaphor goes as follows: as a parent, you can either be a Gardener or a carpenter. The Carpenter: If you are a Carpenter, you have precise control over a final product —… Read more The Carpenter and the Gardener
