Welcome!

Welcome to the blog of Zaq Roberts, Associate Head of School at The Berkeley School in Berkeley, CA. I blog about a wide variety of topics, from classroom moments I witness, to administrative events and conversations, to the educational blogs, videos, and books I am reading and watching, and how they are influencing my thinking. I hope this eclectic approach will give you insight into the many ways that I am engaging in advancing the school and strengthening our program, and I welcome your thoughts and comments!

This blog takes its name from a quotation by Archimedes that reads "Give me a lever long enough, and I can move the world." The TBS mission speaks directly to the need to engage a changing world, while many of the experiences in our program focus on the development of students' agency and authority. TBS is the lever by which we all - administration, faculty, students, and parents - can together move the world to be more humane, compassionate, and responsive. To borrow an important Montessori phrase, it is our way to remake the world.

Thursday, September 22, 2011

Classroom observations

What I saw in the classrooms this week:

Blackberry students playing Guess My Rule, using the ELMO document camera, and a class read-aloud during Siesta....

Laurel students playing Attribute Castle, teachers scribing for students describing their pictures, and cleaning up after a work period and transitioning to recess....

Sweet Briar students creating multi-media self-portraits (now hung on the East wall of the classroom), and preparing a scavenger hunt for their parents on Back to School Night....

Temescal students creating artful displays of how the Earth revolves around the Sun, and how the tilt of the Earth affects the seasons....

4th grade students explaining the different strategies they used to solve the problem 7x8 (skip counting, creating arrays, and using the distributive property)....

Strawberry students creating maps of the basic topography of California, and discussing different waves of human immigration to the state, all the way back to the theory of the Bering Straits land bridge....

Cerrito students discussing poetry, and becoming intimately familiar with the classroom library by re-alphabetizing it....

4th and 5th grade students having the process of writing Reading Response Letters modeled for them in both classrooms, and writing their own letters for the first time this year....

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