I just had lunch sitting next Nikos Palavitsinis from Athens. His organization is grnet.gr. It's all about bringing organic gardening to schools in Athens and it was all started inadvertently by a retired teacher who got a donkey and some chickens and kids started visiting his garden. We have a similar program in LA. WE need to get it our schools.
I wish I could bring Diego Navarro of Cabrillo College in Watsonville, to our school. He talked about working with young people who think they are stupid and can not learn because they continually failed in Middle School and High School, and even elementary school. He showed a short video that was really inspiring. We should watch this during a PD and think about ways we can help our students be successful.
It's been great getting all these different perspectives. I met another gentleman who is a director of a High School with an innovative curriculum and he s having a hard time trying to help teachers who keep falling back into the whole class lecture model. Sometime we feel administrators aren't supportive when we want to try new ideas but how can we learn to teach in a way that was different than we were taught.
Last night I met Liz Lian who has founded an organization that tries to empower parents to work with schools to transform them. HEr group is called empowered*parenting.
All of these people are working hard to create models of schools that support students emotionally, empower parents, create community connections, and provide for the different ways that students learn. We all pay lip service to emotional intelligences and Blooms taxonomy but we need to create support, change the architecture, use technology in a much smarter way.
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