The Meier Institute Symposium
"Remapping Progressive Education"
Saturday, April 17, 2010 * 2:00 p.m. to 3:15 p.m.
Afternoon Workshops (click on the title below to link to a full workshop description)
*Subject to change.
1. Participatory Action Research with Youth
2. Teacher Research Panel
3. Non-Profit Organizations Helping to Get the Word Out
4. Inside Consortium Schools: What the Data Tells Us About Our Students' Learning Experiences
5. Keeping the person present in teacher education
6. Charter Schools’ Role in Progressive Education
7. Supporting teachers in the development of an inquiry approach to mathematics
8. Sustainability of Leadership
9. Why Do We Have Archives
10. Reaffirming the Value of the Early Childhood Curriculum: Accountability and Purposeful Play
11. Panel on Progressive Higher Education – Individualized Major Programs
12. Making Curriculum Decisions in an Era of NCLB: Whose Voices are Heard
13 What does performance assessment look like?
14 The Role of the Arts and Art Education in Progressive Schools: Panel, Workshop and Discussion
15. The Role of Parent Organizing and How Can Parents, Schools, and Communities
Afternoon Workshops Descriptions
1. Participatory Action Research with Youth - Michelle Fine, Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center, CUNY and co-researchers: Niara Calliste, Candace Greene, Darius Francis, Jaquana Pearson, Maybelline Santos, and Jessica Wise with Maddy Fox and Una Osato
Youth Participatory Action Research, with examples from projects undertaken in classrooms and in the community on questions of educational issues, relations with police, gender equity, impact of mass incarceration on youth. An interactive workshop in which we will explore the pedagogies for participatory research, the significance to democratic social movements for educational justice, and the youth development/civic engagement effects of PAR projects.
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2. Teacher Research Panel
A. The Power of Questions: The Potential of Teacher Research to Impact Practice and Policy
Beverly Falk, Professor, The School of Education, The City College of New York; teachers from the Graduate Programs in Early Childhood Education at the School of Education, The City College of New York
The impact of teachers' classroom-based inquiries on their teaching and their schools. How do their investigations of dilemmas in their teaching and of challenges they face in their schools help them understand how teaching is problematic, not a given, and how inquiry is a part of good teaching? It is critical for teachers’ voices to be heard in policy discussions about education.
B. Providing what Standardized Tests Cannot: The Certified Teacher Researcher
Vanessa Rodriguez
Teachers are natural ethnographers ideally positioned to provide qualitative data complementary to standardized testing. A Certified Teacher Researcher model is a creative new way of “doing education”. The CTR is a proposed career track for teachers to effectively train/conduct research while teaching in a 50/50 split model. The CTR pathway re-imagines a teacher’s role as intellectuals expected to study and think while continuing their practice of teaching.
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3. Non-Profit Organizations Helping to Get the Word Out
A. Diane Watchell: The New Press was established in 1990 as a not-for-profit alternative to the large, commercial publishers. Operated editorially in the public interest, The New Press is known for publishing underrepresented voices, serving new and neglected audiences, the variety of innovative formats it has developed, the diversity of its staff, its philosophy of publishing books based on their merits rather than their commercial value and an interventionist approach to the leading issues, seeking to use its books to help set the terms of key emerging policy debates and as catalysts for social change.
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B. Teachers, Students, and Researchers as Partners in Inquiry and Action
Rachel Seher (rachellseher@gmail.com), Matthew Block, Rita Kamani, Liz Tracy
The Critical Educator Network is a group of educators who participate in bi-weekly
forums using a unique curriculum that synthesizes the imaginative potential of educational, social, and political theory with the transformative potential of sharing resources and experiences to reshape our own work. For example, teachers collaborated to design a class of eighth-grade boys to collectively conceive of and execute a social entrepreneurship venture by enlisting their community’s support in preventing gang violence in East Harlem. The panel will build a bridge between our own network of educators, the broader community of progressive educators and researchers, and our students, who ultimately grow as a result of our collaboration.
C. Bree Picower - The New York Collective of Radical Educators (NYCoRE) is a group of current and former public school educators committed to fighting for social justice in our school system and society at large, by organizing and mobilizing teachers, developing curriculum, and working with community, parent, and student organizations. We are educators who believe that education is an integral part of social change and that we must work both inside and outside the classroom because the struggle for justice does not end when the school bell rings
4. Inside Consortium Schools: What the Data Tells Us About Our Students' Learning Experiences
This interactive workshop looks at some of the quantitative and qualitative data about the benefits of a "Consortium Education." Martha Foote, the Research Director of the Consortium, will discuss the initial results of her ongoing study about Consortium schools in relationship to other public schools in New York City. Maria Hantzopoulos, Assistant Professor of Education at Vassar College and former Social Studies at Humanities Prep, will share parts of her qualitative study. She specifically focused on former and current students' perspectives at Humanities Prep and how they made meaning of their experience at a school that emphasized democratic processes. Participants will be invited to share their own experiences as educators in Consortium schools.
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5. Keeping the person present in teacher education
Cecelia Traugh, Dean of the School of Ed at LIU Brooklyn Campus; Cecilia Espinosa, Professor of Early Childhood education at Lehman College
Keeping the child present as we educate teachers and keeping the person of the teacher present as we educate teachers and as we evaluate our program. We will describe how we work for this large purpose and how we deal with the conflicting points of view and pressures.
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6. Charter Schools’ Role in Progressive Education
Suzanne Eckes, Associate Professor in Education Leadership and Policy Studies at Indiana University and Leo Casey, UFT Vice President of Academic High Schools
The charter school movement offers educators greater freedom and flexibility to implement innovative educational programs. The Obama administration’s emphasis on accelerating charter growth virtually guarantees an increase in the total number of charters and, as a result, charters such as those focused on progressive education.
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7. Supporting teachers in the development of an inquiry approach to mathematics – Jonathan Katz, lead mathematics coach for the Institute for Student Achievement; Joseph Walter, mathematics coach for the Institute for Student Achievement; Cathy Brown, professor of Mathematics Education at Indiana University
The mathematics classroom should be a place where students are engaged in interesting and challenging open-ended tasks. Inquiry instruction in the mathematics classroom will best prepare students for higher education.
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8. Sustainability of Leadership
Shoots from Roots! Sharing and Sustaining Leadership in Our Schools
Facilitators: Dave Lehman & Joe Greenberg
Lehman Alternative Community School, Ithaca, NY
In this session participants will be part of a conversation about shared and sustainable leadership, and specifically why it matters, how it spreads and what it takes to have it last. The two facilitators will share anecdotes about their school’s experience in preparing for and then actually transitioning from a long-serving founding principal to a new leader. What was realized through the process was what Andy Hargreaves and Dean Fink explain in their book, Sustainable Leadership, specifically that preserving a school’s culture and beliefs requires a shared responsibility of all stakeholders -- students, teachers and other staff, parents/caregivers, and governing board members, not just the designated leader. Together, we will explore and examine how to foster an activist engagement with external and internal forces that work to affect or compromise the core values of a school over time. The primary aim is to share strategies and help promote an environment of “organizational diversity that promotes cross-fertilization of good ideas and successful practices” that nurtures progressive shoots to grow from their honored roots.
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9. Why Do We Have Archives ?
Breon Mitchell, the head of the Lilly Library at Indiana University, will talk about the recent acquisition of Deborah Meier's work along with Jane Andrias, a former principal of Central Park East 1 Elementary School and co-founder of the Urban Archive at Long Island University, will talk about how schools use collected works of current students and their teachers to shape reflective teaching, learning and assessment.
How does the collecting and study of the work of an educational leader, of teachers and of students offer a lens into knowing the person as a thinker, a learner and support the decisions we make about shaping policy and instruction?
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10. Reaffirming the Value of the Early Childhood Curriculum: Accountability and Purposeful Play
Early Childhood – Panelists are: Mary McMullen Professor of Early Childhood Education at Indiana University, Erin Hyde, Marilyn Martinez and Yvonne Smith, early childhood teachers at Central Park East, Patsy Cooper of NYU and the chair is Julie Diamond, author Welcome to the Aquarium.
We want children to have a rich vocabulary, to be literate, to handle numbers/math concepts, to be socially competent and engaged with their environment. How does play contribute to these goals? What evidence of learning can teachers provide? How does documentation contribute to accountability and to whom are teachers accountable?
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11. Panel on Progressive Higher Education – Individualized Major Programs
Dan Gordon, Professor of history at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, David Moore, Gallatin School of Individualized Study, NYU and John Ryan, former president of Indiana University and Chancellor of the State University of New York.
Dan Gordon will provide an overview of individualized major programs. This includes discussion of how these programs originated in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, how they responded to student demand for greater freedom in the articulation of majors and choice of courses, the importance of personal academic advising in these programs and how the concept of “individualized” education has recently merged with the concept “interdisciplinary” education to create an even more powerful image for these programs than they originally had.
David Moore will address the question of how and what students learn through the challenge of constructing their own concentrations or majors. Students in individualized major programs are challenged not only to learn a variety of content but also to rethink the very concept of knowledge and the boundaries among academic disciplines.
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12. Making Curriculum Decisions in an Era of NCLB: Whose Voices are Heard
Jesse Goodman, Professor of Education and American Studies at Indiana University and Karen Adams and Diane Carruthers from the Lehman Alternative Community School.
Perhaps the most important question facing those of us involved in the education of children is: What content is most worthy given the limited time students spend in schools? Unfortunately, during the last decade, there has been a concerted effort to remove teachers from the curriculum decision making process, and thus removing them from asking the previously mentioned question. As a result of overly detailed standards lists, scripted instructional programs, and high stakes testing, teachers are being asked to merely “deliver” or “manage” the pre-determined curriculum. This session will briefly explore the history of efforts in the United States to “deskill” teachers, and then present the work of teachers who have resisted these “deskilling” efforts by engaging in substantive curriculum decision making. Karen Adams and Diane Carruthers from the Lehman Alternative Community School in Ithaca, New York will discuss how they use Howard Zinn's and other progressive materials to promote critical thinking and social justice issues in their high school and middle school social studies classes. Time will be saved for group discussion based upon these presentations. Who decides what is important to teach? How can teachers resist a national curriculum, both in their classrooms and through political action?
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13. What does performance assessment look like?
Presenters are Phyllis Tashlik and Don Freeman from the NY Performance Standards Consortium.. For more than ten years, the schools in the New York Performance Standards Consortium have been developing, refining, and expanding their performance assessment system. It's a system with many layers, based on the idea that "learning is complex, assessment should be too."
In this workshop, we will review the system as a whole; the central role of teachers in sustaining and improving the system; the components, rubrics, and interim assessments; the annual moderation study; and the role of external evaluators.
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14. The Role of the Arts and Art Education in Progressive Schools: Panel, Workshop and Discussion
Hear from four arts educators at Central Park East 1 speak to what they value for children, and how working in a progressive framework intersects with their arts practice. Participate in a collaborative arts workshop led by the arts educators. Bring your own knowledge, questions and responses to a culminating discussion.
Panelists:
Tim Lively, Art Teacher
Peggy Pettitt, Story Teller-in Residence
Monica Rodriguez, Music Teacher
Todd Rolle, Movement/Theater Teacher
Facilitated by Kathleen Ruen, Graduate Faculty - Art of Teaching Program, Sarah Lawrence College
15. The Role of Parent Organizing and How Can Parents, Schools, and Communities
Join Together to Strengthen our Public Schools
CIF is a community organizing, education, and training center committed to
building parent, school, and community partnerships that strengthen our
public schools and that insure a high quality education for ALL our
children. CIF members are mostly low income women of color and community
members who are parents of children in NYC's public schools.
Workshop facilitators: Perla Placencia and Donna Nevel