November 2013 - Eagle Rock Blog

Eagle Rock an Active Participant in Recent CES Forum

Nine of our staff members actively took part in the recent 2013 Fall Forum hosted by the Coalition of Essential Schools (CES). The conference was held earlier this month at Mission High School in the heart of San Francisco, with this year’s theme titled “Making the Invisible Visible: Stories and Counter Stories for Educational Equity.”

Our Eagle Rock staffers got the long weekend off to a good start by facilitating a two-hour meeting with directors from about a dozen CES Affiliate Centers — including our hosts, the San Francisco Coalition of Essential Small Schools — at the Clift Hotel.

That meeting presented a great opportunity for directors to check in with each other and explore the nature of their collaboration.

In addition, Eagle Rock staff members led three of the longer workshops on Saturday afternoon, including Michael Soguero and Dan Condon co-presenting “The Ten Principles as the Lens for Implementing the Common Core.”

CES is celebrating more than 25 years of what it terms “creating and sustaining personalized, equitable, and intellectually challenging schools.” The 2013 gathering saw representatives from schools and organizations from as far away as the Netherlands and Japan — all eager to explore how the CES 10 Common Principles apply to their practice.

Each year, the fall forum presents an opportunity for educators to continue “a conversation among friends,” as CES founder Ted Sizer once said.

Richard Carranza, superintendent of San Francisco’s Unified School District, started Saturday’s sessions off by addressing the need for Continue reading…

Eagle Rock’s CrossFit-ERS Literally Run the Gamut

“All right. It’s 4:45! Time to warm up! Today’s workout is everyone’s favorite! Fran!!! 21-15-9! Thrusters and pull-ups!”

Four days every week, a handful of staff and students report to Eagle Rock’s Human Performance Center for an intense hour of stretching, running, lifting, jumping — and whatever else the day’s workout calls for. They’re there because pain is good, and extreme pain is extremely good. They’re here for CrossFit ERS!

Eagle Rock School (ERS) has always engaged students in a range of physical fitness activities, including swimming, running, skiing, and dancing. Physical Fitness is written into our school’s eight themes and Developing Mind, Body and Spirit, as well as Making Healthy Personal Choices are part of Eagle Rock’s 10 Commitments. While these values were established in 1993, their true relevance hasn’t been more significant than in this era of virtual relationships, childhood obesity, and school curricula that is hyper-focused on using the mind, often at the expense of the whole person.

And now an exciting element has been added to our Human Performance curriculum in the form of our designation as an official school-based CrossFit Affiliate!

What does that affiliation mean? CrossFit is a different approach to working out, with the aim of forging a broad, general and inclusive fitness. To participate in CrossFit is to “Be prepared for the unknown and the unknowable.” Every workout is different and the intention is to prepare your body for all types of physical challenges.

Eagle-Rock-CrossFit-3 In the end, CrossFitters are looking to increase fitness in a truly measurable way. The workouts challenge participants to perform “constantly varied functional movements at relatively high intensity.” But an even more important component of CrossFit is the communal aspect. The act of like-minded people working out together and supporting each other through the WOD’s (Workout of the Day) has created a worldwide CrossFit community that manifests itself in each Box (CrossFit gym) on a daily basis.

Three years ago, level 1 certified CrossFit trainers and ERS staffers Jeff Liddle and – yours truly, Jesse Beightol – started bringing CrossFit principles to the ERS curriculum through our Science of Strength, High Intensity Training, and Science of Fitness courses. While each of these courses was unique, students used CrossFit and their experiences in the workouts to take a deeper look at their personal fitness and make predictions about their own future health.

Our students would study posture, flexibility, and the musculoskeletal system in a classroom setting for a time, then participate in an intense CrossFit workout that would solidify that classroom learning. That, in turn would enable students to Continue reading…