Welcome

Last year's trip to Costa Rica showed us that education can, and should, be a life-altering experience. This year, a largely new group of students, have decided to learn about and travel to Puerto Rico. With this new topic and destination in mind, we have developed a year-long interdisciplinary class that is based on the same three core principles:

1) Travel to expand students' horizons
2) An explicit connection between the classroom and real world
3) The use of sweat equity for students to see that their efforts can make a difference

During the early fall, the curriculum was largely focused on developing the 21st Century Skills of problem solving, critical thinking, decision-making, and collaboration. This was initially done using group challenges in the classroom, but then became vitally important once we started raking lawns. In addition to being our major fundraiser, this hard work put students in positions that required group problem solving, as well as perseverance and responsibility – traits that we all know are central to changing the trajectory of their lives.

During the winter and spring, each student will be developing an independent research project on a chosen aspect of Puerto Rico. We hope that you will keep checking back as we share our learning, growth and adventures.

Monday, January 30, 2012

Team Building







It's a new semester and we are making great progress towards our goals. Now that we have gotten past the hard labor, we are working on our communication and collaboration skills. The way we are doing this is through team building activities, like we did at the beginning of the year. This week's activity involved taking a long piece of yarn tied in the shape of a circle and turning it into a star. Sounds easy right? Well, we were allowed to communicate before the actual creation of the star. As soon as we started to transform the shape, we could not remove our hands or communicate, (like talking, pointing, or looks). Eventually we made the star, but not without a few "do-overs".

As you know each student in the class is doing a project based on something that is connected to Puerto Rico. With mine, I'm going in a slightly different direction. This is my second year in the Sustainable Education class, and my last year in public school. I wanted to show people what the class goes through when they sign-up for this class. I have said all along that being in this class is amazing and now I want to be able to show people what that means. I want to show how challenges become stepping stones in the student's lives. Because at this point that is what really matters, how we got to the goal, that we will remember the most.
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2 comments:

  1. NancyJanuary 31, 2012 at 10:15 AM

    Awesome description of your learning. I love the pictures. I can't wait to read more about the connections you make between challenges and stepping stones. I admire your persistence and strength.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Brittney FApril 11, 2012 at 5:54 PM

    Mariah what an amazing job! I am so proud of you for staying with the class and traveling Further!

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