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…
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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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Our children now know that what they are creating and learning is interesting and people will want to learn from it; that their knowledge is worth sharing not just to the school community but to the world.
Two important collaborations with NYU and Columbia are now underway at Portfolio. One partnership will give our students the opportunity to apply their learning in music, technology, design, art and science; the other partnership will help our school refine a methodology that is carefully crafted and guided by research.
“At normal schools, the teachers don’t tell you to write on the walls,” one student happily exclaimed.
“Elon Musk, Elon Musk, Elon Musk,” a number of students chanted, as they planned the interviews they want to try to schedule for the film they will create on permanently settling Mars.
"Amidst graduates from some of the best high schools around the world, I was struck by the intelligence that surrounded me. Yet, I felt better prepared for school and life at Columbia. While they had no problem taking notes in lectures or studying for exams, in seminars where deep learning happens at college and when relationships are formed with professors I found myself speaking up on the literature, proposing questions and interacting with texts while they worked to feel comfortable doing so."