Guerilla Educators

Best Practices; International "TechPals"

For much of the 2012-'13 school year, 7th grade students from the Chinese International School in Hong Kong and their US counterparts at East Norriton Middle School (ENMS), in suburban Philadelphia have been in regular communication with each other.  What began as a simple penpal arrangement between the students ("My name is..., I go to..., I like to eat,,,, etc) has become so much more.  Educators at the schools from both Hong Kong and East Norriton have collaborated electronically throughout the Project to include curricular objectives, local customs and holidays, and the increasing use of technology applications.  In April, students from ENMS filmed and edited their first video for their Hong Kong "TechPals", "A Day in the Life" at their school, here:

 

 

Their Hong Kong friends just sent a return video, their first, back to the ENMS students, here:

This Project has been a wonderful experience for both the students, teachers, and the entire school families at both schools. The hope is that it will continue into the 2013-'14 school year.

Student feedback about the project, here...

Doors at Terra Linda High School

While visiting the Marin School of Environmental Leadership at Terra Linda Hogh School, I noticed that many of the classroom doors had been turned into student developed works of art.  Here is a small sample of the doors, ...and one BIG HONKIN' WALL!

Marin School of Environmental Leadership (MSEL)

At the invitation of Cyane Dandridge, Executive Director of Strategic Energy Innovations and Co-Founder of the Marin School of Environmental Leadership, I had the opportunity to visit the school, which is located wholly within Terra Linda High School in San Rafael, California.  The day I visited was "Projects Day" so each of the freshman teams were working on their individually themed Project activities.  Take a look...

International Student "TechPals"

Throughout much of the 2012-'13 school year, students 7th grade students at East Norriton Middle School in East Norriton, PA, have been communicating with their peers at International Schools in Hong Kong and the French Caribbean Island of Guadeloupe.  What began as simple introductory emails between the students has increased in scope across a variety of platforms.  This video, below, is the latest effort by the ENMS sudents.  They wanted to introduce their "TechPals" in Hong Kong to their school so they filmed and edited (with a little help from their teachers, Margie Rothfeld and Donna Sole) "a day in the life" at ENMS.  The 7th graders at the Chinese International School in Hong Kong are spending 2 weeks on mainland China (now that's some class trip!) and plan on their return to respond with their own video to the ENMS students.  As relevant as the Project is for the students, it is, in my view, even more significant that these teachers are beginning to collaborate with each other from across the globe.  Now THAT is interesting!

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On Funding Philadelphia Student Sports

I have an alternative to those in the movement afoot to, um, what's the word... oh yes! extort money from the professional Philly sports teams to pay for School District of Philadelphia sports programs. It is setting up a  false dichotomy that if the mean corporate heads of the Phillies, Eagles, 76ers, and Flyers don't succumb to this shakedown the implication is that they somehow don't support the innocent District children who want to play sports. The alternative to this notion that the less fortunate are somehow entitled to other people's honestly earned money would be to set up a non-profit fund and those who wanted to do so could, instead of spending their own money to buy tickets, tees, memorabilia, etc would donate the cost of the tickets, etc into the Student Sports Fund. Get your own skin in the game! Since the Phillies stink this year, I might even donate the cost of a couple of tickets to such a fund. If they start to compete though, fugeddaboutit.

Tupac and Biggie

First, the caveat.  Please take this post as coming from a 62 year old conservative leaning white Italian guy from South Philadelphia.  That said, whenever I think about the twin homicide tragedies of Lesane Parish Crooks, aka Tupac Shakur and Christopher George Latore Wallace, aka as Biggie Smalls, I get choked up.  Both of these men were murdered in their early 20’s within 6 months of each other in 1996 – ’97 and neither of their assailants has ever been apprehended.  Even within such a short creative time, Tupac and Biggie have had an outsized influence that has transcended far beyond the Rap/Hip Hop genre.  Suffice it to say that Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur were not two of, but the two most intelligent, insightful, and yes, entertaining commentators of the inner city Black and, by extension, American experience of the late 20^th century.  Not unlike Juvenal from the Roman Era, Beowulf, Samuel Johnson from the Enlightenment period, Poor Richard’s Almanac, de Tocqueville, …you get the idea, Tupac and Biggie chronicled the life and times in mostly poor Black America with such acute insight that, had they lived, it makes one wonder how those chronicles might have evolved.  I first, by chance, heard “Juicy” a song on Notorious B.I.G’s album “Ready to Die” in 1994 while driving my daughter to middle school as she was flipping through her favorite radio channels.  I actually had to pull over for a minute to compose myself while listening to that song!  As Biggie says in “Juicy”, …”if you don’t know, now you know, N****r, and I knew then that I needed to know more about this guy.  Something similar happened when I heard Tupac Shakur’s, “Letter to the President” from his album, “Still I Rise”.  In Tupac’s “Letter”, he details with such a ferocious clarity the problems in his “neighborhood”, problems that are imposed from the larger society and far more importantly, from individuals’ personal responsibility, and lack of it, for the distressed conditions in the community.  Am I too effusive in my descriptions of these guys?  I’d love to know what others think.

P.K. Yonge Developmental Research School

This video highlights the newly designed P.K. Yonge Developmental Research School, located in Gainesville, Florida.  Fielding Nair International (FNI) was the Master Planner and Design Architect for this Project and their educational vision is apparent throughout the physical facility.  Take a look:

Senor Peye's Moon Buggy

 

 

Sr Peye, the "shop" teacher at Isidro Sanchez High School in Luquillo, Puerto Rico works with his students to conduct amazing Projects.  In the last 5 years, Peye's students have won NASA's Moon Buggy competition held every year in Huntsville, Alabama where students from around he world compete in various categories.  His students are busy re-designing their Moon Buggy in preparation for the competition set for April.  Buena Suerte!

CLick here http://guerillaeducators.typepad.com/ge/2012/03/rafael-cordero.html to view another video shot at Rafael Cordero Elementary School in Catano, in February, 2012.

Project Based Learning Development Guide

Developing the Project Concept:
•    What type of Project do you want to conduct with your students and why?
•    Will you be collaborating with other teachers in, or out of your school?
•    What content areas do you want to craft this project around?
•    Take a real-world topic related to the selected content areas.
•    Create a Driving Question that will drive investigation into the topic.

Develop a Driving Question that:
•    Is aimed at solving a problem
•    Will lead to deep inquiry
•    Will invite future learning
•    Is meaningful to the student, the school, the community, and/or the world
•    Is an issue that students believe in or have a passion for
•    By answering, they are having a positive impact on something or someone

Understandings/Outcomes:
•    What specifically do you want students to understand?
•    What facts and basic concepts should students know and be able to recall?
•    What will students know and what will they be able to do?
•    What curriculum, standards, and performance-based objectives will be addressed?
•    Will the learning be meaningful and applicable in their lives?
•    Project activities should be connected to curricular objectives.
•    Build planning time in to address curriculum connections.

Skills:    Students will be able to independently use their learning to:
•    Demonstrate citizenship and leadership
•    Work through real-world problems by trial and error
•    Collaborate and problem solve with others
•    Utilize technology to actualize and express ideas
•    Guide future independent directed learning across disciplines using the PBL process

Project Design/Features:
•    What teachers/colleagues should be involved in the collaborative brainstorming process?
•    Is the project part of a curricular unit?
•    Do students have choice of topic within a curriculum?
•    Will the teacher be guiding students in the framing of a driving question? Will students create their own driving question?
•    Is the project interdisciplinary and thematic?
•    Will you be collaborating with other teachers in, or out of your school?
•    Will students work independently or in groups or a combination?
•    Will the project involve class trips and or individual student experiences outside of the school day?
•    Does the project have community partners?
•    Will the project have a service-learning component?

Technology:    How will technology be implemented to enhance the Project by:
•    Communication Collaborating with other students/educators via technology
•    Information sources, information sharing
•    Creating, producing, presenting (Website, documents, etc)

Community Partnerships/Resources:
•    Which Community Partners can help you with your project?
•    In what ways will Community Partnerships model good citizenship/leadership?
•    What resources do you need to see the project through to completion?
•    Will project related class trips be taken?
 
Project Timeline:
•    Overall length of time
•    Time per week
•    Weekly Schedule

Project Activities:
•    Planned to achieve overall project objectives.
•    Connected to grade appropriate curricular objectives in at least 2 subject areas.
•    Engage students to take ownership of their educational processes
•    Are the activities FUN?

Benchmarks:
•    Set clear time referenced deadlines for each task and/or product.
•    Should be scaffolded to build on previously achieved objectives towards success of the project.
•    Help build the guidelines in which the project can take place
 
Reflection/Journals:
•    Student journals will offer students the opportunity to continuously reflect and assess their progress toward completion of the project.
•    Teachers can use student journals as valuable assessment tools.
•    Offer students the opportunity to learn from the strategies that did and, perhaps more importantly, did not work to achieve project objectives.
 
Assessment:
•    Will student be assessed throughout the project cycle or on a final project? Formative/Summative
•    An effective assessment program uses multiple strategies to demonstrate growth and performance, and should be closely correlated to your stated goals.
•    How are rubrics used as an effective assessment and evaluation tool?

Reporting Out:
•    Students will report out to peers, school staff, and the larger community:
•    How they addressed their driving question.
•    What they learned.
•    Their final project products.

Celebration:
How students will be celebrated and recognized for their important work at a Reporting Out Celebration!

Sustainability at American University

Friend and colleague, Emily Curley, is the Sustainability Coordinator at American University.  American U has made an upfront commitment to significantly lessen their carbon footprint on campus and to be a positive example for the neighboring DC community and beyond.  Ms Curley has been tasked with "green up" 25 existing campus buildings so they may achieve a LEED designation.  The hope here at Guerilla Educators is that neighborhood youth can participate in that process.  Some of the ways that can be accomplished, according to Emily, are:

Here are some ideas:

We did a big delamping project in the library this semester and I suspect our electrician might be game to remove more lamps from overlit areas. We already had a student do a light-level study in the res halls, but Tech Prep kids could potentially...

take light level readings in classroom buildings (hands on!) and then suggest how many lamps to remove (critical thinking!), and...

calculate savings for us (math!). The data gathering might only take a day and they could...

make a PowerPoint (technology!) or something and present (language arts!) to our Facilities staff.

A sustainability tour of campus to see our green roofs, solar panels (probably can't take kids to the actual roof but there are some viewing areas), community garden, etc. They spend the next few lessons...

researching and proposing technologies that would be good for the Tech Prep building and why. 

One LEED credit is measuring the area of native/adaptive species. If we could pre-identify some areas with those plantings, students could help measure and record the areas using either just tape measure or fancy surveying wheel and research why native species are important. 

Work a day in the community garden here on campus then...

send students to Tech Prep to help build a small garden there (as I remember they have a good amount of space).

Learn about local, organic food and gardening. 

Help us do a waste audit. This is where you literally sort through the trash to understand the make up of the waste stream thrown away over the course of 24 hours in one building. Our students tend to like this and it's eye opening to see what could have been recycled or composted but instead ends up in the trash. Based on the data...

students could make charts and graphs about the % recycled vs. landfilled and the % that could have been recycled or composted. Easy to set up and would take a day to do.

Last summer, a group of high school students shot a video of the sustainability efforts at American U.  Take a look...