Collaboration & Progressive Education
I recently posted How Progressive is Your School? to highlight our school’s effort to measure just how progressive we are. The discussion centered upon the article by Alfie Cohen and the 8 values (Intrinsic Motivation, Social Justice, Collaboration, Whole Child, Community, Deep Understanding, Active Learning & Taking Kids Seriously) that encompass being more progressive in how we “do” school. We took time to list our questions and action ideas for each of these values. Our next step is to spend time each month to focus on one value at a time.
My plan is to post our staff’s PD work on each of the values in a series of posts. As we drill down on each value, I will further post our community’s discussion and plans to measure our efforts.
To start the posts off, I will list our responses to the value of Collaboration and what comes to mind for our HIS educators.
- One room school house
- Where are we in our interdisciplinary efforts?
- Learning how to collaborate, learning to work and play together
- How do we build a truly democratic school?
- What role does the SRC play in our community decision-making?
- How effective is group work in our classrooms? Which kinds of group projects more effective?
- Which Web 2.0 tools meet the specific and different collaboration needs?
- While we have the structure and culture for collaboration, how well are we doing?, how can we measure our efforts?
- How to expand the collaboration to our immediate and world community?
- Role of administration in all aspects of collaboration?
- Our culture supports mixing of seniors with younger students
- What structures do we have and need to support collaboration in our community?
