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
I was thinking this morning about the central role of democracy in creating positive change. Democracy is a self-organizing, self-directing, and self-correcting process. As long as democracy is in place, positive change will be natural and continuous. Democracy builds this healthy renewal process into the system itself. That’s why I am so excited when we talk about strengthening and… Read more The measure of democracy
Just finishing up Hecht’s Democratic Education. Here is an excerpt that describes his view that democratic education is part of a larger paradigm shift towards the emergence of a true “democratic culture”: We are not in the midst of a passing wave, but rather in a process of changing stages or a quantum leap. If during… Read more Creating a true “democratic culture”
Here is a really interesting description of how a school in Israel created strong connections with the surrounding community by sharing space with other community organizations (from Yaacov Hecht’s Democratic Education): The unique processes that developed there included very strong ties between the school and its surrounding community, as it became a sort of regional community… Read more Building connections by sharing space
