November 2019 - Eagle Rock Blog

Reporting on the Fall 2019 School Reform Initiative Fall Meeting

Eagle Rock’s Professional Development Center (PDC) team — along with Josán Perales, our world languages instruction specialist — descended on Boston in early November to participate in the 2019 School Reform Initiative Fall Meeting.

Presentation at 2019 SRI Fall Meeting about the renaming of Coolidge Corner School.

The School Reform Initiative, or SRI, is a Denver-based organization serving educators across the country, with the objective of creating equitable and effective learning communities. To accomplish this, SRI hosts a variety of professional development workshops across the country, such as reflective learning communities institutes (scheduled for Texas, Florida, and Illinois in 2020) and two-day equity institutes (available on-demand in 2020). It also employs a comprehensive database of protocols for use in professional learning settings. The November 2019 Fall Meeting encouraged participating educators to collaborate with others, tackle pressing challenges facing their organizations, and participate in a variety professional development trainings.

To that end, Sarah Bertucci, our director of professional development, and Travis Burhart, Eagle Rock’s 2019/2020 Public Allies Fellow in Professional Development, arrived a few days early in order to Continue reading…

Athletic Coordinator Changes the Game Plan in Unique Coaching Class

As Eagle Rock’s adjunct athletics coordinator, Jocelyn Rodriguez wears many (sports) hats, ranging from managing the school’s basketball program to heading our Sports Challenge partnership with Strive at Haverford College. Most recently, Rodriguez taught a unique class called Changing the Game, where her students focused on what it means to be a coach in the atmosphere of today’s professional sports.

Specifically, the five-week class addressed how gender, race, and power, and even social media have influenced sports in the United States every bit as much as talent and collective bargaining between players and the team owners. Rodriguez’ students explored the unspoken rules and reality of professional sports by looking at the history and changes that many of our most popular sports are undergoing.

Students learned about the successes of female coaches, including Becky Hammon of the San Antonio Spurs (NBA) and Katie Sowers of the San Francisco 49ers (NFL), both of whom battled to become staff coaches in a sport formerly designated for “men only.” And they examined the Continue reading…

Dan Condon Sums Up Eagle Rock’s Mission in Getting Smart Podcast

Tom Vander Ark, chief executive officer and a partner of the popular Getting Smart online community for educators, was treated to a personal tour of Eagle Rock’s one-square-mile mountainside campus this past August — an experience that was hosted by our own Professional Development Center.

Vander Ark’s popular Getting Smart Podcast features news, stories, and information about innovations in learning and teaching, and during his visit, the Seattle, Wash.-based CEO took time to tape a segment for the show with Dan Condon, associate director of our Professional Development Center.

Vander Ark, who may be known to some readers for his appointment as the initial executive director of education for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, now heads Getting Smart, a learning design company with headquarters in Seattle. The company provides advocacy, advisory, and coaching services with the objective of providing resources that lead to powerful learning for all students. As such, Getting Smart partners with education-focused organizations such as Eagle Rock School and Professional Development Center, as well as other learning organizations across the country, in order to “invent the future of learning.”

During the 17-minute podcast, Condon shared his thoughts on Continue reading…

Four More Classes Round Out our 79th Trimester

What makes a school’s curriculum unique? Here at Eagle Rock, it’s the totality of student experiences that occur within the content of our educational process.

Predicated on the belief that every student has the ability to become fully engaged in their own education, our curriculum focuses on competencies that we refer to as our 5 Expectations:

Learning to communicate effectively: The primary purpose of an Eagle Rock class is to help students understand how to get a message across. That’s why poetry, art, and music often figure prominently into our class offerings.
Expanding one’s knowledge base: Helping students understand and providing them with the tools to learn how to learn, as well as how to apply that learning to other situations, is also part of the Eagle Rock experience. As a result, many of our classes include elements of problem solving.
Becoming an engaged citizen: At Eagle Rock, we’re intentional about helping our students learn something that naturally enables them to interact better with various people and cultures. Sometimes that’s accomplished by learning a second language or taking a class that focuses on worker’s rights.
Acquiring leadership skills in order to achieve justice: Helping students understand what it takes to make a place — our school for example, or the local community in which we are based — more fair and equitable, is another aspect of our educational process.
Creating healthy life choices: Finally, helping students understand that the decisions they make can increase or decrease positive outcomes regarding health of self, society, others, or the environment, is another unique aspect of our curriculum.

With our 5 Expectations in mind, we’re able to conceptualize and offer classes worthy of the student engagement we believe every student is capable of achieving. We also require that all Eagle Rock School students have Individual Learning Plans (ILPs) that guide them on their journey here. And each of those ILPs include distribution requirements. (For more information on distribution requirements, please see Distribution Requirements Play a Big Role in This Trimester’s Latest Class Offerings.)

This trimester, which is our 79th since our founding in the early 1990s, we’re offering five 10-week classes that we’ve previously blogged about and are still occurring (Research, Neuroscience, Jewelry Around the World, Facing History, and Facilitating Educational Change, along with the four new classes highlighted below: Continue reading…