Blogs on Leadership

It's a few minutes after 7 a.m. on a drizzly Friday morning and math teacher Jonathan Winn is standing just outside his first period classroom yelling at the top of his lungs, his voice reverberating across campus. "How does that go?!" He's not so much yelling at his students as yelling for them, exhorting them to shout out the answer to a complex calculus problem, in unison. A few minutes later, Winn is dressed in a wig and a white ruffled shirt, playing 18th-century mathematician Gottfried Leibniz doing calculus in Paris. Later in the 90-minute class, he puts on a drum major's hat and exchanges drum beats and claps with his students, to get them to feel the power of their unity.

Editor's Note: We have two guest bloggers today -- Elliot Washor and Charles Mojkowski, Elliot is co-founder of Big Picture Learning, a global leader in education innovation with 62 highly successful schools throughout America, Canada, The Netherlands, and Australia. Charles Mojkowski is a senior associate at Big Picture Learning. The majority of Big Picture Learning's schools are regular public schools, and some are in-district charters.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

--Marcel Proust

Real World Reality Check

I fell in love with school when I found out about a hidden gem called the Team Program. The Team Program is a rare experiential wilderness education program designed to get juniors in high school out of the four walls they have been accustomed to in the traditional classroom, and into the real world. Twenty-four students from the three major public schools in my county are accepted each year into this public school program. The program is held at a small public high school and the diverse group of juniors spends the year there, before returning to their "home school."

This is the final post in a four-part series on running an edcamp unconference. You can find links to the previous posts at the end of this post.

Once you've taken care of all of the important things like securing a venue, finding sponsorship and assembling a team, there are plenty of smaller details to take care of. Some of these can be accomplished earlier in the game and some can be left to the last minute.