Our new neighbor: REALM Charter School

After many years, the BUSD buildings at the corner of University and Bonar are being renovated for occupancy. The site, which is called West Campus and was once a junior high and then the 9th grade of Berkeley High, has been vacant since the Berkeley Adult School moved to the former Franklin School on San Pablo at Virginia back in 2004. Much of the building will be used as the district headquarters of BUSD, which is leaving its current site at Old City Hall.

The West Campus site is also going to house a new charter school called REALM, which stands for Revolutionary Education and Learning Movement. The school has an admirable list of skills and outcomes, including intellectual openness, analysis, inquisitiveness, reasoning/argumentation, interpretation, problem solving, creativity and innovation, critical thinking, collaboration, ICT literacy (information, communications, and technology), and media literacy. The program will have four core elements; project-based learning, immersive technologies, Mindfulness in Education (transformative life skills), and participatory action research. They will open with 100 6th grade students and 100 9th grade students next fall, and grow to a full enrollment of 100 students per grades 6-12. We look forward to welcoming REALM to the neighborhood, and the opportunities for collaboration that may arise!

The Power of Music

A very interesting article, published in the August edition of The International Journal of Music Education. If you want to read it, send me an email or stop by to say hi, and I'll give you a copy.


The power of music: its impact on the intellectual, social, and personal development of children and young people.


1. By Susan Hallam
2. Institute of Education, University of London, UK,

Abstract

This paper reviews the empirical evidence relating to the effects of active engagement with music on the intellectual, social and personal development of children and young people. It draws on research using the most advanced technologies to study the brain, in addition to quantitative and qualitative psychological and educational studies. It explains how musical skills may transfer to other activities if the processes involved are similar. It explores the evidence relating to the impact of musical skills on language development, literacy, numeracy, measures of intelligence, general attainment, creativity, fine motor co-ordination, concentration, self-confidence, emotional sensitivity, social skills, team work, self-discipline, and relaxation. It suggests that the positive effects of engagement with music on personal and social development only occur if it is an enjoyable and rewarding experience. This has implications for the quality of the teaching.

Sugar Skulls and Snap Cubes

On this morning's admissions tour I lead a group of prospective parents into the Laurel Creek classroom during what turned out to be Project Time. In one corner, Middle School Spanish teacher Tanya Madrid-Campbell was sitting with a table full of K/1 students making sugar skulls to celebrate Dia de los Muertos. A few children sat at a nearby table doing a coloring activity with sugar skull designs. Julia and Lyssa were working with two more tables of children doing three-addend addition with a Halloween theme (the children drew skeletons, pumpkins and candy, counted up each group, and then added them together to a single total). And in the block area, two children were animatedly talking and putting together dozens of snap cubes into large blocks. At the time, I wondered to myself why everyone in the class seemed to be engaged in the projects provided, except those two children, but the structure of the tour didn't allow me to check in with the teachers.

Later in the day, during the ECC-3rd grade faculty meeting on Core Competencies after school, Lyssa brought up those two children as an example of the competency of initiative. She explained that after they had finished the other pre-set activities for the day, the two had decided to try to build sugar skulls out of snap cubes - great examples of the "awareness" and "motivation" components of the disposition of learning that we talk about at TBS. They had come up against some challenging design problems that spoke to the "skill" component of the triangle of learning disposition; how to create indented eyes, as sugar skulls have, and how to create the curves of the skull using the cube shapes? The discovery of these questions was itself a critical learning moment that directed the next step in the children's visual-spatial development, and arose at exactly the right time and in just the right way - from their excitement in building on the activities provided by the teachers, and applying their own creativity to the central idea. Hearing her retell this incident, I also reflected back on my jump-to-assumptions, and how important it is to sometimes be able to see without thinking, and ask before assuming. Wow!