The Weekly Newsletter of Educational Alternatives - www.EducationRevolution.org
SAVE THE DATE: AERO conference, June 26-29 at LIU/Post Campus, near New York City. 
Did you miss our FREE PDF book offer of Turning Points: 35 Visionaries in Education Tell Their Own Stories? The excerpt includes essays from Alfie Kohn, Lisa Delpit, Riane Eisler, Gustavo Esteva, John Gatto, Herbert Kohl, & Deborah Meier. All you have to do is like our page and the 100-page printable PDF download is yours! Click here.

AERO conference site is now open for registration and workshop proposals!
We can't open up the food and housing yet for this year's AERO conference until our contract with LIU/Post is finalized. But we can now take registrations and deposits for the early bird rate and can take applications for workshops and presentations. The conference will be June 26-29th. We have already arranged for Zo� Neill Readhead, daughter of Summerhill School founder A.S. Neill and current head of the famous school to be our first keynote speaker.

Community & Education Interview Series: Paul Reville


Read the latest interview in the ongoing series about the relationship between community and education. This week's interview is with Paul Reville, the former Massachusetts secretary of education and current professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

  
Would You Send Your Kids to a School Where Students Make the Rules?
One December morning, Ellie, my kindergartener, woke up and, on hearing that school was canceled because of imminent snowfall, decided to draw a picture for her teacher of a gingerbread man missing a toe, with an explanatory caption. "It's my work today," Ellie said. She then instructed me to deliver the page to her teacher's house, which is five doors from our own. At about 7:15 a.m., when I went out to walk our two dogs, I did as Ellie had instructed, slipping the picture into the mail slot of her teacher's house. At 7:53 a.m., an e-mail from the teacher arrived in my and my wife's inboxes, with a photograph attached, showing the picture already stuck to her refrigerator.

We would love our daughters' school even if it weren't at the corner of our street, but we love it more because it is. Even though it's a magnet school, most of the students, some of the teachers, and even our recently retired principal all live in the neighborhood. When my daughters learn to write their letters or multiply numbers, they are learning from and with people who live near them, shout to them from windows, and keep them safe. School doesn't have to be like that, but I have concluded that it should be.
 
 
The Infinite Classroom: Teaching to Multiple Intelligences
Thirty years ago, developmental psychologist and Harvard education professor Howard Gardner published Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. The book set off a depth charge underneath the comfortable Stanford-Binet IQ test-based academic world in which learning ability was widely regarded as binary-verbal and mathematical. Drawing on his research with both brain-damaged adults and "normal" child development, Gardner proposed that rather than two main areas of intelligence, there are eight: linguistic, logic-mathematical, musical, spatial, bodily/kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic.
 
Gardner was careful to make the distinction that what he had developed was a theory of developmental psychology and not a theory of education per se. Nevertheless, his thinking offered a breath of fresh air to a great many educators, validating and organizing as it did something many of them had long intuited about the failures of cookie-cutter instruction.
 
 
Restoring teaching as a respected profession
by Lynn Stoddard

What has happened to the teaching profession? After serving for 36 years as a teacher and elementary school principal, and retiring in 1986, I have watched teacher morale plummet, some of the best teachers leave, more students drop out, and bullying and school-related suicides increase. I've watched as teachers are asked to do impossible things, and then be criticized when they can't do them. I've watched student achievement remain flat.

As a teacher, I'm angry and insulted when non educators in the legislature make edicts like this one: "All students must be able to read at grade level by the end of 3rd grade." Then I'm further frustrated when our state school board endorses such positions as though they come from God. If we thought the pressure on reading instruction was heavy under the No Child Left Behind Law -- when recess, art and social studies were sacrificed on the reading alter -- wait until you see what's coming! Do you not wonder why our children and youth are reading fewer books than ever before?

Read the full article here.

Real Teachers - Chris Mercogliano 

What makes a school good?  More than any other single factor, the answer is good teaching. While many of us, myself included, were never fortunate enough to go to particularly good schools when we were children, we occasionally lucked into a good teacher-someone who genuinely cared about us, really enjoyed teaching, and had a sense of humor-and what an enormous difference this person made in the quality of the experience.

 

Research like the Minnesota Study of Risk and Adaptation, confirms the value of good teaching. The recently completed landmark study closely followed the lives of 180 kids born into poverty from conception through age 30 in order to determine why some were able to transition into successful adult lives and others were not. After all the numbers were crunched, one difference in particular stood out: nearly 100% of the resilient participants had an influential teacher in high school who took a special interest in them.

 

If you're interested in this excellent book by AERO member, Stuart Grauer, you can order it directly from us!

News & Resources
Do you have a news or resource item you think Education Revolution newsletter readers would find useful? Send it to jerryaero@aol.com.
Thank you for your ongoing support. With your help, we will make learner-centered alternatives available to everyone!

Sincerely,

Jerry Mintz
Executive Director
Alternative Education Resource Organization

January 12, 2014 
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