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…
Viewing entries tagged
projectbasedlearning
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!
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.
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.
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?
Portfolio brings the d.school experience into elementary school and seeks to redesign the meaning of creativity in formal 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.
Exploring community, angles, our solar system, and more. Happy Holidays to ALL!!
Last Week at Portfolio: sequences, 3-D modeling, 3-D printing, presenting who we are to the school, and more...
This Week at Portfolio: What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be me? Creating lessons for Google Science Journal App, a trip to New York Hall of Science, and more.