โ’Walk in beauty,’ is sage advice I learned from Native elders. Since my youth, when I was fascinated with Native wisdom, I have strived to walk the beauty way, but it took me until middle age to understand my path. The secret? Being engaged in a purpose โ a higher calling… Our greater calling at Rainbow Community School is to return beauty back into education. American education has forgotten how to walk in beauty. By infusing beauty into education I believe we can usher in a new era that will restore faith in American education and bring hope to humanity”.
RCS Director, Renee Owen, discusses how Beauty is necessary in balancing the triad of mind, body, and heart within education. Read the full article: Heart of the Matter: Beauty
Try it out for a dinner table discussion. ย The question, “Who had a fabulous struggle today?” is a great example of what educators call a growth-mindset prompt. Studentsย and adults with a growth mindset believe that humans have almost limitless potential. ย Therefore, the more effort they put forth, and the more willing they are to overcome mistakes and obstacles, the brighter and more capable they will become. ย People with a fixed mindset view people as being innately born with a fix potential. ย If you are smart, you are lucky, and vice versa. ย Therefore, mistakes are perceived as failures, rather than learning opportunities. ย Parents and teachers can build self-concept and self-esteem by encouraging one another to embodyย a growth mindset.
Affirmative action isn’t just about merit, defined by the same one size fits all empirical measures of the past. The purpose of education can no longer be about sifting out who deserves merit, and taming those who don’t. That competitive model is obsolete. If we are to survive and thrive in the 21st Century, education needs to be about how to solve problems collaboratively.
As Harvard’s Lani Guinier explains in this brilliant video, in order to solve a problem, you don’t want just the smartest person–or even the two smartest people– in the room, because they will get stuck with the same way of thinking. She gives a scenario where Steven and John both score about 7 out of 10 on a test. Jane only scores 5 out of 10, but she got all the answers right that Steven and John got wrong. What’s the better team? Steven and John? or Steven and Jane? The latter, of course. THAT is what affirmative action is about, not just giving merit to the highest test scorers.
Instead, our higher institutions have been in such a rut for so long of admitting only the highest scoring students (even with Affirmative Action), that there is not enough diversity of thinking– not enough people who have different experiences and different perspectives working together and learning from one another. ย This may sound very odd — but it is a little like inbreeding pure-bred dogs. ย After awhile, the intelligence suffers. ย Mix the breed, and you have a brilliant animal. ย When we mix our “intelligences” we, as a team, are smarter.
Rainbow Community School is committed to diversifying our faculty, parents, and student body. ย Together, we can learn.
Rainbow Community School has been doing student-led conferences since the early 80’s. ย When students lead their own conference, they truly have to reflect on what they have learned, how they learned it, and what their future goals are. ย Plus, it gives parents the opportunity to gain greater insight into how their child thinks, what is meaningful to their child, and what their school experience is like through their child’s eyes. ย Our student-led conferences will be the last one of the year, and a great way to wrap up the year. Other progressive schools have followed our lead and started doing student-led conferences, in particular International Baccalaureate (IB) schools. ย Check out this great video from The Wildwood School:ย http://www.edutopia.org/practice/student-led-conferences-empowerment-and-ownership
I love this letter from Howard Gardner to Zuckerberg. When I first read the announcement that 99% of Facebook stock would be given away and that “personalized learning” would be a major philanthropic focus, I was compelled to write Zuckerberg and Chan to urge them to consider personalized learning as something much more sophisticated than individuals learning by themselves, at their own pace, but essentially with the same old content and approach. Gardner said it for me in his letter. (Rainbow Community School’s Seven Domains modelย of learning has many similarities to Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences — and indeed, our founder was a contemporary of Gardner’s at Harvard) I hope his important message is heard. There is one thing I would have added to Howard Gardner’s letter: Social learning (the Interpersonal Intelligence, or the Social Domain) is critical to deep learning. We need to hear other’s thoughts, bounce around ideas, and perhaps most importantly in today’s world, students need to know how to work with one another in a diverse setting. So I hope “personalized learning” will include the important social dimension. Humans are social beings– we need one another for so much, including learning.
