What is Next?
What can each of us do to turn big schools into small schools?
What can each of us do to help small schools become stronger?
Just keep asking those two questions. The answer will come.
We can help small schools succeed.
Become a mentor. Small schools need adults to come into the school and to listen to questions from students. As a mentor, your role is easy: Make sure the students you talk with are given something unconventional. Give them a role model.
What Can We Do? Let’s get going…
1. Visit a middle school. There is one task that a teacher can’t do or pay for: Getting an adult to speak with a small group of students in a class and to answer their questions. Your time will spark something in the brains of the kids. A teacher can’t always make that happen. You can. You are a mentor.
2. Record yourself and post the video on youtube. Send the link tovisualandactive@gmail.com. Let students hear your answers to: What do you remember from school?
What did you do to learn to read? What did you like to read?
What books or articles or magazines do you recommend others to read? Tell us about an article that you read recently.
What did you learn in school that you really value today?
What did you learn outside school that you use in your life today?
Do you remember a teacher’s name? Tell the camera the name of that teacher and why that teacher sticks out in your memory.
3. Become a phone mentor. One phone call per day. Just five or six calls each week.
4. Ask to become a mentor to a class. The best teacher is a facilitator who allows mentors (adults who are not teachers) to talk with and listen to students..
5. Read some of these books:
A Whole New Mind and Free Agent Nation by Dan Pink
The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman
Blink by Malcolm Gladwell and anything on snopes.com
Studio Art by Lois Hetland
The Big Picture by Dennis Littky
Visit these sites:
The StudentistheClass.com by Abe Fischler
Bigpicture.org metcenter.org for Dennis Littky’s work
WhatDoYaKnow.com by Dennis Yuzenas
http://www.pz.harvard.edu Project Zero’s site at Harvard university for continuing education, click on “products and services” and join the mailing list. Ask your child’s teachers and principal to subscribe to learn what’s new and effective.
Search on Youtube:
“Yuzenas visual” “Littky Small” “Abe Fischler”
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