This post was last updated on September 5th, 2011 at 11:03 am
I'm at Educon.
If you're not familiar with Educon, it's a conference/conversation hosted by Chris Lehmann and the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, PA.
I was fortunate to be able to spend Thursday and Friday hanging around the school. Here's what I saw:
- Lots of smiles.
- Loud classrooms
- A principal's office that looked more like grand central with equal numbers of staff and students talking and working, coming and going
- Teachers who discussed personal issues with students
- A brief power outage that didn't paralyze learning despite them being a 1:1 school
- A lack of emphasis on technology
- Students occasionally off task
- Students excited to talk with adults
None of these things are particularly amazing and are all things you could find in many, if not all schools in North America. I didn't see one thing that couldn't be done almost anywhere. The teachers are good teachers but they aren't doing anything I haven't seen before. So what's the big deal?
There are many more observations and insights that one would make beyond the few I've listed but I'm not sure that any additions would tell us that "… Read the rest