Between the
NBC "Education Nation" Summit,
Waiting for Superman,
The Oprah Winfrey Show, and Facebook founder
Mark Zuckerberg's $100 million gift to Newark city schools, there has been a lot of media attention focused on the topic of education reform. Unfortunately, much of it has excluded actual educators, let alone students. Furthermore, and perhaps as a consequence, the dialog has become divisive, blaming, and ultimately counter-productive.
FutureofEducation.com and
Edutopia are collaborating this coming Monday on a two-hour live and interactive look at "Elevating the Education Reform Dialog"--an online discussion with special guests and specifically for educators, to help move past the bashing and to engage in a constructive conversation about the best way forward. Connection details are at the bottom of this post.
UPDATE (10/4/10) - Today's Schedule (click on "other" for other time zones):
2:00 pm Pacific / 5:00 pm Eastern (
other) -
Alfie Kohn
2:15 pm Pacific / 5:15 pm Eastern (
other) -
Diane Ravitch
2:30 pm Pacific / 5:30 pm Eastern (
other) -
Deborah Meier
2:45 pm Pacific / 5:45 pm Eastern (
other) -
Chris Lehmann
3:00 pm Pacific / 6:00 pm Eastern (
other) -
Gary Stager
3:15 pm Pacific / 6:15 pm Eastern (
other) -
Will Richardson
3:30 pm Pacific / 6:30 pm Eastern (
other) -
Julie Evans
3:45 pm Pacific / 6:45 pm Eastern (
other) -
Sir Ken Robinson
4:00 pm Pacific / 7:00 pm Eastern (
other) -
One hour "Open Forum" for educators and others to voice ideas and feelings about education reform.
Julie Evans is the CEO of the national education nonprofit organization, Project Tomorrow (www.tomorrow.org) whose mission is to ensure that today's students are well prepared to become tomorrow's leaders, innovators and engaged citizens of the world. Under her leadership, Project Tomorrow has emerged as a national leader promoting the use of innovative and research based science, math and technology resources in our K-12 schools to develop critical thinking, problem solving and creativity skills in students.
Alfie Kohn writes and speaks widely on human behavior, education, and parenting. The author of eleven books and scores of articles, he lectures at education conferences and universities as well as to parent groups and corporations.
Kohn's criticisms of competition and rewards have been widely discussed and debated, and he has been described in Time magazine as "perhaps the country's most outspoken critic of education's fixation on grades [and] test scores."
Chris Lehmann is the founding principal of the Science Leadership Academy, a progressive science and technology high school in Philadelphia, PA. The Science Leadership Academy is an inquiry-driven, project-based, 1:1 laptop school that is considered to be one of the pioneers of the School 2.0 movement nationally and internationally. The school was recognized by Ladies Home Journal as one of the Ten Most Amazing Schools in the US, has been recognized as an Apple Distinguished School in 2009 and 2010 and has been written about in many publications including Edutopia Magazine, EdWeek and the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Deborah Meier has spent more than three decades working in public education as a teacher, principal, writer, advocate, and ranks among the most acclaimed leaders of the school reform movement in the U.S. Meier was born in New York City in 1931 and was educated at Antioch College and the University of Chicago. She began her teaching career in Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia as an elementary and Head Start teacher, continually fascinated with why schools did not work well and what was needed to fix them.
Diane Ravitch is Research Professor of Education at New York University and a historian of education. In addition, she is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. She shares a blog called
Bridging Differences with Deborah Meier, hosted by Education Week. She also blogs for Politico.com/arena and the Huffington Post. Her articles have appeared in many newspapers and magazines. From 1991 to 1993, she was Assistant Secretary of Education and Counselor to Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander in the administration of President George H.W. Bush.
Will Richardson considers himself an "evangelist" for the use of Weblogs, RSS and related Internet technologies in classrooms and schools. Over the past six years he's had the chance to speak and work with thousands of educators from around the world on the merits of "The Read/Write Web." He was a classroom teacher for over 20 years who integrated these technologies into his curricula for over four years. In various Weblog projects, his students have collaborated with best-selling authors, Pulitzer Prize winning journalists, and with students in classrooms from around the world.
Sir Ken Robinson, PhD is an internationally recognized leader in the development of creativity, innovation and human resources. He has worked with governments in Europe, Asia and the USA, with international agencies, Fortune 500 companies, and some of the world’s leading cultural organizations. In 1998, he led a national commission on creativity, education and the economy for the UK Government. ‘All Our Futures: Creativity, Culture and Education’ (The Robinson Report) was published to wide acclaim in 1999.
Since 1982,
Gary Stager, PhD, an internationally recognized educator, speaker and consultant, has helped learners of all ages on six continents embrace the power of computers as intellectual laboratories and vehicles for self-expression. He led professional development in the world's first laptop schools (1990), has designed online graduate school programs since the mid-90s, is a collaborator in the MIT Media Lab's Future of Learning Group and a member of the One Laptop Per Child Foundation's Learning Team. Mr. Stager's doctoral research involved the creation a high-tech alternative learning environment for incarcerated at-risk teens. Recent work includes teaching and mentoring some of Australia's "most troubled" public schools. Gary was Senior Editor of District Administration Magazine and Founding Editor of The Pulse: Education’s Place for Debate.
Date: Monday, October 4, 2010
Duration: 2 hours
Location: In Elluminate. Log in at
http://tr.im/futureofed. The Elluminate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Elluminate, please visit
http://www.elluminate.com/support. Recordings of the session will be posted within a day of the event at the event page.
