At Portfolio School, we utilize Project-Based Learning to fully immerse and engage our students in their learning. One of the most beneficial processes we use is the collaborative fusion of cross-disciplinary projects that span core academic disciplines, thematic unit work, and fundamental special skills such as computational thinking, art, and making.
Thank you to the team at HundrED for inviting us to present at the LEAPS Summit. It was so wonderful connecting with educators from around the world interested in learning about our school…Watch our pre-recorded panel discussion.
Imagine you have an idea. Something you’re passionate about or some solution you think will help people deal with a problem. The next step is to figure out how you’re going to implement it. And that can be daunting…
To say we have a “Social Emotional Learning” curriculum is not completely accurate. At Portfolio, it’s more like our Social Emotional Learning is infused in everything we do.
Check out Portfolio co-founder, Doug Schachtel, on the “Learning Unboxed” Podcast.
As a school team we recognized a desire to utilize technology in a way that not only allowed us to stay organised and collaborative, but most importantly allowed - hopefully even insisted - students take increased ownership of their learning experiences. After an exhaustive search, we ultimately landed on the Altitude Platform.
Understanding the differences between traditional, progressive and project-based curriculums may help in navigating an unknown future.
Listen to a podcast featuring Portfolio co-founder, Babur Habib…Everyone deserves the best possible education, yet our current traditional one-size-fits-all educational model born during the industrial age is not meeting the needs of our new, rapidly evolving knowledge-based economy. The next generation deserves a personalized educational experience that better equips them with the skills, values, and knowledge they need to thrive in a new modern world. We got to chat with two leaders pushing to revolutionize education, Orly Friedman, co-founder of the Red Bridge School, and Babur Habib, co-founder of the Portfolio School. Both share priceless insight and stories that highlight the challenges of helping children better prepare for a new modern world.
I want to take you through the steps of a fun, woodworking project: the making of a simple wooden wall sconce. This is a lamp that hangs on the wall and provides soft, diffuse light from behind a sculptural shade. The shade is built from a wooden frame with translucent fabric or heavy paper stretched over the center. These lamps can be abstract or representational. Depending on the wattage of the bulb they can be a serious source of light or a nightlight.
At Portfolio every day is maker day. However, we are always searching for ways to provide our students with even more opportunities to learn and apply design and making skills. To expose them to a wide panorama of making possibilities – from woodworking and welding to cooking, sewing and robotics. That way, they can apply these skills to their everyday work, individual projects, and inquiry-based unit projects.
…my great-grandfather and my grandfather were both optical scientists, so there is a tradition in my family of being able to make anything. My grandfather worked for Kodak, and he invented one of the first pacemakers. He and I spent many afternoons building things together!
David is a great fit for Portfolio, with extensive teaching experience and excellent fabrication and design skills. He is an incredibly student-centered and collaborative teacher.
Screentime is a fundamental aspect of raising children who can engage with an increasingly complex world, but it’s fair to ask, “How much is too much?” In advance of our panel, hosted by the Portfolio School, we’ve asked our guests to respond to this question: What do you think is most misunderstood about kids and screens, and why?
It has been an exceptional first month of school at Portfolio, with everyone buzzing with thoughtful and joyful energy! We have embarked on a new school year in a wonderful new space, and we are immersed in our innovative approach to heart, hands, head, and body.
How much can kids learn about Artificial Intelligence in one week? At Ai Camp, our campers learned to express themselves through Ai creations while learning foundational concepts such as computational thinking, seeing the world through sensors, and machine learning. Here are some highlights…
I am very excited to welcome Susanna Block as our Curriculum Development/Implementation Specialist for next year! Susanna is an exceptionally thoughtful and student-centered educator, who brings more than a decade of experience as a teacher and administrator to this role. She has served as both a teacher and leader, and has led efforts to shape curriculum at both the lower and middle school levels.
Through Project ScaleUp teachers will be able to search for project “maps” according to different topics and grade levels, and even modify them for their students. The library of quality project maps will thus grow as each new customized project (which has been successfully implemented) is uploaded to the platform.
I’m thrilled to introduce the Portfolio Community to another talented educator joining our team in the Fall, Katie Cheek. Her expertise, deep commitment to project-based learning and teaching, and student-centric approach are abundantly clear and impressed us in her hiring process. She is also warm, highly creative, and has a great sense of humor.
We are very excited to welcome Molly Brown as our new Lower School teacher! Molly inspired and impressed us during her candidate visit to Portfolio with her warmth, expertise, and the connections that she made with our students. Her demo lesson engaged our students in a hands-on, inquiry-based activity, and her conversations with us reflected her passion for experiential, maker-centered learning and teaching.
It was great to see how other people are taking on the same challenge of re-inventing K-12. The schools represented in the group have a lot of different approaches and focuses: some are just Middle School, one has an inter-generational element, some are urban, some are suburban, one is designed for home-schoolers...But our similarities far outweigh our differences. And our hope is that in coming together, we can collect our individual voices and form a movement, creating a shared vision and thus enabling a bigger impact.
One of our amazing parents, Teri Hagedorn (mother of two of our students), interviewed our new Head of School, Lorenzo Krakowsky. She got to the heart of what has led him from running top Progressive schools to Portfolio, what opportunities he sees here, and more…
While the struggle of boys in traditional school models is made clearly evident to parents, that of girls is not nearly so visible. For one thing, girls are socialized early to meet and exceed expectations of “good behavior”. Girls in traditional schools demonstrate daily the skills they have spent their preschool years mastering: compliance and competence. Their early expertise in self-regulation (raising one’s hand before speaking, taking turns) comes at the expense of self-confidence, inhibits risk-taking for fear of failure, and undervalues pushing boundaries.
For the communication unit, Group 1 began by exploring books, stories, and the magical journeys inside. Excited to act out favorite stories, we learned about how setting, character, and plot make up a story, practicing the ways that artists communicate these aspects of stories.
At schools like HLS and Portfolio School, PBL prepares all students female and male, but I would argue it’s particularly important for girls hardwired to always try their best. PBL prepares girls to succeed in both the classroom and the boardroom by giving them the confidence to take risks and fail and it socializes them to excel in a magnificently imperfect world where confidence matters more than competence.
When a child enjoys coming to school, everything is possible. While filming interviews for Exhibition Night, we asked our students what they liked about their school. This is what they had to say.
Here’s an idea I’m exploring. What if we could use AI to get information about children’s projects. So instead of using standardized tests to measure learning, we can use AI to gain a better understanding of what a child can actually do with all the knowledge gained at school. We don’t need to know how well a child can retrieve the algorithm for long multiplication. We need to know if children understand how to use it for real situations they care about, not for a hypothetical imposed test question.
Every time children create a project they are consciously engaging in constructing a public entity (e.g., an artifact, document, or artistic exploration). This entity represents a piece of the children themselves—their thoughts, their feelings, their adventures, and their learning.
Say the word “autumn” and you evoke images of brightly-hued leaves, baskets of apples and harvests of pumpkins. In New York City, especially for parents of four-year-olds and older students looking to transition next year, you also provoke anxiety about the admissions process: when can you visit schools, what will they require of you and of your children, how can you tell if a school is the right school for your child and your family?
On September 24 we welcomed two inspiring thinkers to our community. Ned Johnson and Bill Stixrud have written a book, “the self driven child,” that has been getting a lot of attention and praise all over the place. The book also caught our attention at the school and we invited them to come to speak to the Tribeca community.