Workshop Preparation Materials

Prior to attending the February 27-28, 2007 School Community Workshop co-sponsored by the Coleridge, Laurel-Concord, Newcastle and Wynot school districts, Teachers, Administrators, and Board Members were asked to become familiar with Dennis Littky's "The Big Picture" prior to the workshop. All participants were also asked to read the Time Magazine article posted below. The following summary of the budget challenges that the districts will face in the coming years was also made available for participants.

To review the budget projection please click here.

The Big Picture
Education is everyone's business.

While there are lots of books about education that propose to change what you do in classrooms and schools, here's one that promises to transform how you think.

Drawing from 35 years of taking on tough schools with disadvantaged kids and achieving the kind of progress that many thought "couldn't be done", Dennis Littky explains the principles and rationale of a model for schooling that gives students what they need most. Discover how a philosophy of personalized learning--one student at a time--is the key to creating schools where motivated students are engaged in a meaningful curriculum, and academic progress is measured against real-world standards.

How to Bring Our Schools Out of the 20th Century
By CLAUDIA WALLIS, SONJA STEPTOE • Posted Sunday, Dec. 10, 2006
There's a dark little joke exchanged by educators with a dissident streak: Rip Van Winkle awakens in the 21st century after a hundred-year snooze and is, of course, utterly bewildered by what he sees. Men and women dash about, talking to small metal devices pinned to their ears. Young people sit at home on sofas, moving miniature athletes around on electronic screens. Older folk defy death and disability with metronomes in their chests and with hips made of metal and plastic. Airports, hospitals, shopping malls--every place Rip goes just baffles him. But when he finally walks into a schoolroom, the old man knows exactly where he is. "This is a school," he declares. "We used to have these back in 1906. Only now the blackboards are green."

Related Information

The following materials were also prepared as resources for the workshop.

Articles
Documents
Videos
Statistics

Articles

Big Trouble for Small Schools
Center for Rural Affairs
An analysis of the proposed changes to Nebraska’s school finance formula and school structure shows that many of Nebraska’s rural schools could suffer from imposition of a “small by choice” factor. Research has consistently shown that smaller schools have some advantages over their larger counterparts.

Judge Sets Hearing In Wynot School Case
Tuesday, February 13, 2007 • Yankton Press and Dakotan
HARTINGTON, Neb. -- A Cedar County, Neb., district court judge has ordered an April 5 hearing on amended petitions from property owners seeking to transfer their land from the Wynot, Neb., school district to the Hartington, Neb., district.

Report identifies ed-tech trends to watch
Emerging forms of publication, massively multiplayer educational gaming among trends on the horizon expected to have a huge impact on schools
By Justin Appel, Assistant Editor, eSchool News
A recent report from the New Media Consortium and the nonprofit group EDUCAUSE identifies six emerging technology trends that could have a significant impact on education in the next one to five years.

More students across US logging on to online classrooms: Time restraints, jobs, yen for AP classes all factors
By Seema Mehta, Los Angeles Times | February 18, 2007
LOS ANGELES -- After Ben Hathaway's father was called to active duty in the Army National Guard, the 15-year-old had to help his family tend the 130 head of cattle on their 345-acre farm in Leoma, Tenn. Traditional school burned through too many daylight hours, so Hathaway started taking online classes through Lutheran High School of Orange County in Southern California, about 1,750 miles away.

Technology Has Tremendous Impact on How Teens Communicate
Cellular News • February 20, 2007
American teens now live in a world in which the Internet, cell phones, text messaging and other technology dominate their communication and are an integral part of life as they understand it.

Documents

The Simplicity Cycle
by Dan Ward
I’d like to take you on a trip, exploring something I call . On this excursion, we’ll spend a little time exploring a diagram I invented. We’ll wander through four distinct regions, we’ll slide along three different slopes, and we’ll briefly talk about an ureachable fifth region where nobody lives. But before we begin, we need to set the stage.

NG KIDS Advisory Team E-Mail Survey on the Future
National Geographic August 2005
An email invitation and survey link were sent to National Geographic Kids magazine Advisory Team
members on Aug. 1 to ask their thoughts about the future, as a tie-in with the magazine’s September
2005 Future World issue. Responses were accepted until Aug. 14. A total of 184 of the 423 active team
members with email addresses logged on to take the survey, for a 43 percent response rate.

Education Criteria for Performance Excellence
Baldrige National Quality Program • National Institute of Standards and Technology
The Baldrige Education Criteria for Performance Excellence are about students excelling! They also are about an organization that is high-performing, has high integrity, and is characterized by the ethical behavior of its students, faculty, and staff.

Be Constructive: Blogs, Podcasts, and Wikis as Constructivist Learning Tools
Learning Solutions July 31, 2006 • By Joyce Seitzinger
Learning is not unlike the Borg; it thrives by assimilating technologies never originally intended for education, from the printing press to the audio cassette. (If you are not familiar with Star Trek, I apologize for the reference — it’s a geek thing.) With the arrival of the World Wide Web, learning stepped up a gear and developed a new sub-entity, e-Learning.

Cross Training
October 2006 • By Grace Rubenstein
At one Boston school, arts and academics are inseparable.

From Themes to Projects
Early Childhood Research & Practice • Volume 1 Number 1 Spring 1999
Many teachers who begin to implement the Project Approach are familiar with a learning center or theme
approach to teaching. Often there are some important differences to become aware of. Projects are
especially valuable for children in undertaking in-depth study of real-world topics. This paper presents the
reflections of several teachers on their experiences moving from the use of a theme approach in their
classrooms to using the Project Approach.

Task, Text, and Talk: Literacy for All Subjects
Stephanie McConachie, Megan Hall, Lauren Resnick, Anita K. Ravi, Victoria L. Bill, Jody Bintz and Joseph A. Taylor
Disciplinary literacy builds secondary students' academic content knowledge and their reading, writing, and
thinking skills at the same time.

THE NEW FACE OF LEARNING
BY WILL RICHARDSON ILLUSTRATIONS BY DAVID JULIAN • October 2006 • Edutopia
WHAT HAPPENS TO TIME-WORN CONCEPTS OF CLASSROOMS AND TEACHING WHEN WE CAN NOW GO ONLINE AND LEARN ANYTHING, ANYWHERE, ANYTIME?

No more teachers, no more books
'Educators' lead School of the Future, and 'learners' all have laptops
By ALISON KEPNER, The News Journal • Posted Wednesday, September 20, 2006

One Kid at a Time
How to Make Learning More Engaging, Relevant and Real in Your Classroom, School, and District
based on ONE KID AT A TIME: BIG LESSONS FROM A SMALL SCHOOL Teachers College Press (2002)

The Big Picture: Education Is Everyone's Business
by Dennis Littky and Samantha Grabelle
Chapter 4. One Student at a Time

New Skills for a New Century
BY BOB PEARLMAN • June 2006 Edutopia
Project-based learning teaches kids the collaborative and criticalthinking abilities they’ll need to compete.

Framework for 21st Century Learning
The Partnership for 21st Century Skills has developed a unified, collective vision for 21st century learning that can be used to strengthen American education.

21st Century Skills for 21st Century Learners
Our children live in a global, digital world – a world transformed by technology and human ingenuity. Many of today’s youngsters are comfortable using laptops, instant messaging, chat rooms, and cell phones to connect to friends, family, and experts in local communities and around the globe. Given the rapid rate of change, the vast amount of information to be managed, and the influence of technology on life in general, students need to acquire different, evolving skill sets to cope and to thrive in this changing society.

Learning for the 21st Century
A report and Mile Guide for 21st Century Skills

Results that Matter - 21st Century Skills and High School Reform
Partnership for 21st Century Skills

Free Radicals
By Amy Standen • October 2006 Edutopia
In the country’s most alternative classrooms, there’s no such thing as a report card.

Pew Internet and American Life Project
The Pew Internet & American Life Project studies the social impact of the internet. The Project examines the way that people's internet use affects their families, communities, health care, education, civic and political life, and workplaces.

The Internet’s Growing Role in Life’s Major Moments
By John Horrigan and Lee Rainie • April 19, 2006
The internet has become increasingly important to users in their everyday lives. The proportion of Americans online on a typical day grew from 36% of the entire adult population in January 2002 to 44% in December 2005.

School Trends for the 21st Century - Shaping the Future of Education
School Business Affairs December 2001 • Volume 67, Number 12

A State Leaders Action Guide to 21st Century Skills
A new vision for education
July 2006 • Partnership for 21st Century Skills

Technology in Schools - What the Research Says
Cisco Systems and Metiri Group

Time Out - Time is a resource we still haven't figured out how to use wisely
2005 SEPTEMBER EDUTOPIA
Learning in America is a prisoner of time.For the past 150 years, American public schools have held time constant and let learning vary. The rule, only rarely voiced, is simple: Learn what you can in the time we make available. It should surprise no one that some bright, hard-working students do reasonably well. Everyone else—from the typical student to the dropout—runs into trouble.

Scaling Up the Big Picture
essay number 4 • August 2004
principal investigator Joseph P. McDonald, New York University
associate investigators Emily Klein, New York University • Megan Riordan, New York University