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Readers Corner
In Passionate Readers: The Art of Reaching and Engaging Every Child, classroom teacher, author, and speaker Pernille Ripp asks and answers, “how do we inspire students to love reading and discovery? In the book she reveals the five keys to creating a passionate reading environment. Throughout, Pernille opens up about her own trials and errors as a teacher and what she’s learned along the way. She also shares a wide variety of practical tools that you can use in your own classroom. Pernille will be a keynote speaker at the 2018 EARCOS Teachers Conference in Bangkok.
The Take-Action Guide to World Class Learners Book 1: How to Make Personalization and Student Autonomy Happen, Yong Zhao, Homa S. Tavangar, Emily McCarren, Gabriel S. Rshaid, and Kay F. Tucker This inspiring guide from internationally respected expert Dr. Yong Zhao and others provides the most complete information available on designing twenty-first century schools poised to leapfrog into the future! In this follow up to World Class Learners, Zhao digs much deeper, revealing how exactly to put his paradigm shift into effect, one component at a time. Dr. Zhao is a past keynote speaker at EARCOS conferences. Emily McCarren works at EARCOS member, Punahou School.
The Innovator’s Mindset, George Couros Kids walk into schools full of wonder and questions. How you, as an educator, respond to students’ natural curiosity can help further their own exploration and shape the way they learn today and in the future. The traditional system of education requires students to hold their questions and compliantly stick to the scheduled curriculum. But our job as educators is to provide new and better opportunities for our students. It’s time to recognize that compliance doesn’t foster innovation, encourage critical thinking, or inspire creativity—and those are the skills our students need to succeed. In THE INNOVATOR’S MINDSET, George Couros encourages teachers and administrators to empower their learners to wonder, to explore—and to become forward-thinking leaders. George Couros has presented at both the EARCOS ELC and ETC.
Setting the Standard for Project Based Learning, John Larmer, John Mergendoller, and Suzie Boss Project based learning (PBL) is gaining renewed attention with the current focus on college and career readiness and the performance-based emphases of Common Core State Standards, but only high-quality versions can deliver the beneficial outcomes that schools want for their students. It’s not enough to just “do projects.” Today’s projects need to be rigorous, engaging, and in-depth, and they need to have student voice and choice built in. Such projects require careful planning and pedagogical skill. The authors—leaders at the respected Buck Institute for Education—take readers through the step-by-step process of how to create, implement, and assess PBL using a classroom-tested framework. John Mergendoller is a past presenter at an EARCOS conference.
Fighting for Change In Your School, Harvey Alvy In this indispensable book for K–12 leaders, Harvey Alvy offers a thoughtful roadmap and guidance to help educators select, implement, and assess school- or district wide initiatives that actually work. The book is filled with a wealth of resources—action checklists, principles to guide educators, and in-depth questions and protocols—for engaging in collaborative professional development activities that strengthen teaching and learning practices and improve student achievement. Harvey Alvy will be a special presenter at the 50th anniversary ELC 2018 in Kuala Lumpur.
Hard Conversations Unpacked In Having Hard Conversations, Jennifer Abrams showed educators how to confront colleagues about work-related issues through a planned, interactive, and personal approach. In this sequel, readers move deeper into preparing for those conversations while building expectations for meaningful outcomes. Emphasizing what needs to happen before, during, and after hard conversations. Jennifer is scheduled to present at ELC 2018.
Green and Sustainable >> Student-led Programs Inspire Green Initiatives at Concordia International School Shanghai By Julie and Karen, Grade 11, Concordia International School Shanghai
Concordia AP Environmental Science students learn ways to organically remediate the soil to better grow crops in their rooftop gardens
Millennials have been endlessly warned by older generations of the environmental disasters they stand to inherit. Sadly, younger generations have grown up seeing these human-instigated environmental issues as the norm. Acutely aware of the horrifying nature of these current issues, Concordia students have taken action to make their school more eco-friendly.
High school students explore sustainable solutions to global issues effecting the planet in classes such as AP Environmental Science and Global Development and Public Health. That exploration spills over into co-curricular clubs as well, including the student-led Environmental Committee which takes on issues ranging from energy efficiency to animal welfare, publicly informing students about paramount environmental topics. Around the school, the club has posted reminders to turn off lights, to print double sided and to use only one paper towel after hand washing. These signs remind the school community of the small steps we can take to benefit the environment and show how our carbon footprint can be reduced through simple daily actions. This led to students other than those involved in environment-related clubs voluntarily collecting paper around the school and their homes, not only bringing the respective grades together but involving the community in their efforts to encourage paper recycling. Moreover, the Environmental Committee further increases their efforts to promote green initiatives at school by hosting a clothing swap at least twice each year where students donate their gently used clothes and let others in the community pick out items they want for free.
Concordia’s Global Issues Network (GIN) is another club that focuses on various environmental issues as well as human rights and animal welfare. Inspired by one member’s drive to reduce plastic waste on campus, GIN members gathered hundreds of signatures for a petition showing how the students and faculty support the cause by banning one-time-use plastic bottles on campus. With the school community behind them, students have proposed to the school administration several alternatives that can help to achieve this goal.
High school students bring elementary students into the equation as well by hosting an annual elementary school workshop to educate the younger students on specific global issues. Last year we focused on the effects of factory farming on the environment and making conscientious choices that can reduce the consumption of animal products.
In all these ways Concordia International School Shanghai hopes to foster a new generation of conscientious citizens who care about our Earth and take action to protect it.
Students do not stop at raising awareness; we encourage others to actively participate. The Environmental Committee hosts a yearly competition between high school grade levels with the grade that collects the most scrap paper in a week being named the winner.
Julie and Karen are grade 11 students at Concordia and active members of the school’s Environmental Committee.
Middle School Art Celebration
Nansha College Preparatory Academy (Left) Iris, Oil Pastel Kelly Wan, Grade 8
Green and Sustainable / Service Learning >> The Green Revolution: Why nature is our greatest classroom
As a teacher on the island of Bali, a location surrounded by islands full of nature and ecological torment I wrestle with the language of eco-awareness that threatens to destroy student’s morale along with the planet and I am driven to engage students. Engage them in activities with the aim they seek the solutions that will provide them and future generations with the ability to live harmoniously within their communities and environments. So, it was with excitement I ventured out to the North Sumatran city of Medan to meet one of the world’s most respected primate scientists Director of Conservation at PanEco Foundation and Scientific Director for the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme, Dr Ian Singleton. My plan was to get permission to take a group of Year 12 students into the Leuser Eco System, 2.6 million hectares of tropical rainforest and literally the last place on earth where rhinos, tigers, elephants and orangutans live amongst the world’s richest forest system. Forest floor leaf litter and insect shells.
I scrambled over roots that tangled into staircases, along precipitous pathways to the steaming waters of the hot springs and I asked myself the question: Why don’t we just watch this on television? With the wave of the wind passing above us and the soft air dropping in temperature, the sun shifting against the horizon turning the evening sky into a spreading bruise… I answered the question.
I stumbled into a smoky bar in the middle of Ramadan to be greeted with a beer. What a relief! I introduced myself to Dr. Singleton and explained my intent. “Why are you going to take a bunch of kids into the forest? Why not just leave the animals alone and watch a programme about them on TV?” was the terse response. A good question.
Then I was there, in the forest, and asking myself the same question: Why do we want to bring students here to this edge of nature where man’s imprint is harsh and damaging? Why is it so important that it is real? What if we just watched it on television?
As the arching trees swayed with the weight of a mother orangutan and her baby, as their orange fur no longer a blur shone in the sun, I watched silently, holding my breath. As I walked through the soft paths littered with damp leaves and the moss carpeted branches of fallen boughs, I thought about the question. I gazed at the hollow shell of a mosquito eating plant, I stood within the furled trunks of a tree over a hundred years old, and I crept up beside orchids to sit by the rushing of a waterfall.
32 EARCOS Triannual Journal I paused at the sound of the hornbill’s wings beating on the air with a bass drum rhythm and heard the laugh of the Thomas Leaf Monkey before witnessing the deep black softness of the Siomay, or gibbon, as it broke through the canopy dropping split fruits to the forest floor. We bring students here and places like it, because the forest is alive with life, with ideas, with creation, destruction, with cycles of life, with inspiration and spirit. Its existence holds back floods, its layers nurture lives on the edge of extinction, its darkness protects the tigers and the rhinos, the snakes and the bats.
It is home to the butterfly, the bee, the ant and the honey bear, it grows sensuous orchids, and poisonous vines and it gives the mind a place to understand. And this is what we need to understand:
Animals and plants of all sizes and forms exist in a delicate balance in the forest ecosystem. From death and decay springs life. Each year it moves inwards, contracting with increasing rapidity as it becomes a victim to the greed of the ‘little man’ who sees it as nothing more than a vast tangle of unnecessary nature, standing in the way of greater profits.
The forest is moving and not by its own force… rapidly, defiantly and perceptibly. This will be eventually how the forest sweeps us out of existence; in a sacrificial gasp it will take every living thing down with it.
So that is why we need to take our students into nature. So they can see and feel the force that supports all life. So they can touch and smell the cycles of growth and decay. So by recognizing it for what it is, learning what it contains and indulging in the thoughts it pro-vokes, they become moved to protect it.
And saving it not for themselves, or the trees, or the orangutans or the hornbills but the entire fabric from which life is woven. If as environmental educators we do not connect students to nature in the raw we are condemning them to life without it.
TAUGHT IN CARACAS. READY FOR THE WORLD.
