Learning How to Care: Building Academic Identities

By Bob Lenz

This is the second part of a guest posting from my colleague, Kyle Hartung, who has worked in small schools for ten years as a classroom teacher and instructional leader in New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area. As part of the Leadership and Instructional Team at Envision Schools, he coaches and facilitates professional development among school leaders and teachers.

Learning How to Care: Celebrating Student Successes

By Bob Lenz

This is part one of a two-part guest posting from my colleague, Kyle Hartung, who has worked in small schools for ten years as a classroom teacher and instructional leader in New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area. As part of the Leadership and Instructional Team at Envision Schools, he coaches and facilitates professional development among school leaders and teachers.

The Challenge of Creating Community: Meetings and Managers

By Bob Lenz

In part one of this entry, based on responses to an earlier post of mine, I reproduced some queries about how to establish a communal learning environment at school, and my responses. Here, I continue with questions and answers about how to hold community meetings and how to encourage fellow educators to share your enthusiasm:

I'm looking for resources and ideas on how to run a community meeting.

The Challenge of Creating Community: First Steps

By Bob Lenz

My reflections on building community in schools have sparked a lot of responses and many questions. It appears people are looking for specific tactics, tricks of the trade, and ideas from Envision Schools and our cyber colleagues. I will offer some ideas here, and I encourage others to respond with their insights and strategies.

The challenge I am facing right now is trying to build this school culture in a conventional setting at a big-city school.

Intervention for Failing Students: The Mandatory Study Session

By Bob Lenz

At a recent professional-development day, I challenged my colleagues to think about how we could reduce the number of students in our lower division (grades nine and ten) -- especially the ninth graders -- who fail high school courses. "What if we decided that failure is not an option," I asked them, "that success is the only choice available to us?"

Here's one strategy that seems to be working at our newest school, the Impact Academy, in Hayward, California:

Structure in Project-Based Learning: The Freedom to Learn Requires Planning

By Bob Lenz

When a colleague at another urban high school commented to me that because his students needed more structure, he no longer employs project-based learning, I replied that his decision presumes that PBL is unstructured. My experience as a teacher, an instructional coach, and a school leader has taught me that effective PBL is highly structured -- structured to facilitate student learning -- whereas traditional instruction is often structured to support teacher-directed instruction and student compliance.

A Community of Learners: Building a Supportive Learning Environment

By Bob Lenz

Recently, a nationally recognized expert in classroom management visited the campuses of Envision Schools to help coach our teachers. Though he had plenty of advice about how we can make our learning environments more structured so student learning is accelerated, he was also effusive about the sense of respect he witnessed between students, between students and teachers, and between adults in the schools.

A Place for PBL: Envision Schools's Project Exchange

By Bob Lenz

This is a guest posting from my colleague, Kyle Hartung, who has worked in small schools for ten years as a classroom teacher and instructional leader in New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area. As part of the Leadership and Instructional Team at Envision Schools, he coaches and facilitates professional development among school leaders and teachers.

The Journey Continues: An Inspirational Message

By Bob Lenz

Today, Envision Schools kicked off its fifth school year by opening a new school in Hayward, California, called Impact Academy. Our three other California schools -- City Arts and Tech and Metropolitan Arts and Tech, in San Francisco, and Oakland's Envision Academy -- started the school year, too.

More than 1,000 students attend an Envision School in our Bay Area network. The following letter was sent to all Envision Schools staff:

August 27, 2007

Dear Envisioners,

Teachers, Like Students, Learn by Doing: Project Learning at Envision Schools

By Bob Lenz

A quote by experiential-education pioneer Kurt Hahn projects brightly onto a large screen: “We are crew, not passengers.” After a brief welcome, the thirty-five new teachers at Envision Schools are asked to respond to the quote in their journals. Then, following some quiet reflection time, the teachers meet their fellow group members.