As I sift through my thoughts from the site visits this past week, the theme that keeps recurring to me is the different ways the schools we visited supported either their teachers or their students, or both. Every school we visited had a non-traditional schedule, including our last site, Mt. Carmel, which I haven’t had time to write about. This provided for both tutorial time for students within the school day as well as teacher staff development time within the school day. I really liked […]
Category: Site visits
We’re back…
We have returned from our site visits tonight and there is a lot to absorb! I was reading a new book, Wikinomics, on the plane, which is about how the new collaborative and connective nature of the web is changing our culture. To me, that is what the site visits were all about. We’ve made connections with all kinds of different schools and teachers in another part of the country, and they are connections we can draw on to bring new ideas into our school, and the other […]
On to San Diego
Today we visited two very different schools and learned an incredible amount of things from both of them. Poway is a high school of 3,000 in the surburbs, somewhat similar to the Westlake area, outside of San Diego. We talked to them about their senior project which is a culminating experience to the senior year, and which students work on with their social studies and English teachers. Students are connected with a business mentorship in the community as part of this. Poway also has a […]
The view from L.A.
Yesterday we visited Harvard Westlake and attended a few classes as well. Their campus is unbelievably beautiful, situated on top of a hill overlooking the city. Their schedule is somewhat similar to ours, but they attend classes only four days. One of the most striking things there was a beautiful art gallery, and they also use it to showcase a local artist often. It convinced all of us even more of the value of having an art gallery. The gallery also has a mounted flat […]
Back on the plane…
A few things that stood out from our visits yesterday (this is quick because we have to get to the airport early this morning!)– –Gunn has “departmental” secretaries–a group of teachers over several departments share an assistant who is stationed at a location where students or teachers can access their help. They also have an assistant who sets up the labs for the science teachers (and both Palo Alto and Gunn have beautiful lab spaces for that). –Looping–Gunn “groups” 9-10 graders in their English classes […]
Home of high tech
We’ve made it to San Jose, the home of innovation, (after flying with a few Academy award attendees to L.A. yesterday). We’re off to visit the first two high schools on our trip this morning, Palo Alto and Gunn, and then we hope to visit Stanford’s campus this afternoon. It’s chilly and rainy in San Jose. There was lots of good conversation and reading on the flight. We’ll be posting photos on flickr as we go, so check out the sidebar to see more of our […]