March 2018 - Eagle Rock Blog

Eagle Rock Hosting Mid-June Pre-Service Education Retreat

School Reform Initiative (SRI), in partnership with Eagle Rock School and Professional Development Center, is excited to host its third annual summer retreat for pre-service teacher educators here on our campus in Estes Park, Colorado, June 18-19, 2018.

Pre-service teacher educators represent schools or organizations interested in School Reform Initiative tools that include protocols in supporting their teacher training programs. The retreat targets educators interested in strengthening their teacher training programs as well as those interested in joining a collegial group of others who do.

The day-and-a-half program runs from 8 a.m. on Monday, June 18, and concludes at noon on Tuesday, June 19. First-time visitors to Eagle Rock can participate in tours of our school that will take place Tuesday afternoon once the retreat concludes. As we’ve done in the past with this program, our Professional Development Center staff is providing facilitation for the day-and-half retreat, as well as sharing insights on work we’ve done here at Eagle Rock as an alternative licensure program.

The retreat promises to provide an excellent educational opportunity for SRI affiliates, whose work includes supporting pre-service teacher candidates in both traditional and alternative certification programs. In fact, before reading more about the 2018 retreat, take a look at the following video recapping the 2017 experience: Continue reading…

Eagle Rock Celebrates 25 Years Creatively

This summer marks the 25th anniversary of Eagle Rock School and Professional Development Center, and as might be expected, an academic challenge is among the many events planned for this celebration of 25 years of reengaging youth in their own education.

But first, a word about the festivities planned for Saturday, June 30, here on our mountainside campus in Estes Park. While specific events for the day are still being firmed up, you can count on lunch, tours of many of the 26 buildings (including engaging activities with many of the spaces within the development zone of our 640-acre campus), the opportunity to reunite with alumni and meet current students and new and veteran staff members.

And speaking of games and activities, we’re asking current and past students and staff and friends in the Eagle Rock community to submit a six-word story that best describes their experience with Eagle Rock. Why only a half-dozen words? How can anyone define an experience in six words? By Continue reading…

Eagle Rock School Produces Colorado Premiere of the Musical Allegiance

The Colorado premiere of the musical Allegiance will be staged early next month in Estes Park by students at Eagle Rock School, with a talk-back session with cast members on the docket for one of the three performances.

Allegiance, which was inspired by the personal experiences of noted actor George Takei (who currently stars in the Los Angeles premier of the musical), is the story of the Kimura family, whose lives were upended — along with those of 120,000 other Japanese-Americans, all of whom were forced to leave their homes following the events of Pearl Harbor that preceded World War II.

The Colorado performance constitutes Eagle Rock School’s 2018 Spring Musical, and in preparation, students attended numerous local theater performances, visited with Japanese American internment survivors, attended history lectures and toured a traveling Smithsonian exhibit called “I Want the Wide American Earth,” and participated in a rigorous 10-week Eagle Rock School class aimed at supporting students in the development of their acting and production support skills.

Allegiance will be shown at Continue reading…

New Class Offerings Challenge Students’ Leadership, Learning Capacities

Among the visions we pursue here at Eagle Rock School and Professional Development Center is for each of our nation’s students to become meaningfully engaged in his or her own education. That objective sounds good on paper, but where it differs from other schools is that our own students — students here at Eagle Rock School — actually learn in part by engaging.

What is standard practice here at Eagle Rock — and what we have made available to our students for more than two decades — are both traditional and nontraditional classroom offerings that ignite the imagination, encourage curiosity, and prepare young minds for the real world.

With that in mind, we have just introduced seven new classes to the curriculum for this, the second half of our first trimester at Eagle Rock for 2018. These five-week classes join three 10-week classes that began in January and are still underway.

Those 10-week classes include Data Analysis, where students continue to use statistics to look for patterns to self-generated questions. A second 10-week class — Neuroscience — has students examining not only the physical makeup of the brain, but the physiology, or habits, of the human nervous system. And in Exposure, the third 10-week class, students have been mastering black & white photography, processing their film in a darkroom, and are now preparing their photographs for a public exhibition in just a few weeks.

Below is a brief description of the new classes at Eagle Rock that got underway just this week: Continue reading…