Mesa Expeditionary School of the Arts Archives

Mapleton School Teachers Focus on Self-Managed Classrooms

Dave Manzella, currently the school designer at EL Education, was Eagle Rock School’s literature and literacy instructional specialist back in 2008 through 2011. Last month, he came back to Eagle Rock to facilitate a training program for another Colorado school.

Mapleton Expeditionary School of the Arts (MESA) is a grade 7-12 public school in the Mapleton School District located in Thornton, Colo. MESA has been an EL Education (formerly Expeditionary Learning) School for more than a decade, and MESA’s administrators wanted to begin the new academic year grounding the staff in the school wide objective of developing more self-managed classrooms and school.

They partnered with us here at Eagle Rock in a daylong program that saw the MESA staff gather off campus for some focused time away from other beginning-of-the-year distractions.

The day (August 8) was spent Continue reading…

Spring 2016 Update from the Professional Development Center

“Plan your work, then work your plan.” I’m not sure who said it first or if it really matters. All I know is if you decide in advance precisely how you’re going to get from where you are to where you want to be, you stand a much better chance of getting there.

At the level of the lowest common denominator, that’s the essence of any plan, including Eagle Rock’s strategic plan for 2015-2020, aptly titled Vision 2020. And as I shared just last week here on the Eagle Rock Blog (see: Strategic Plan Update: National Contribution), the Professional Development Center team is hard at work facilitating programs, trainings and other custom offerings that lead the high schools with whom we work to transform themselves into high-functioning centers of engagement and learning.

More than half of Eagle Rock School’s instructional specialists — those educators who work within our own school — are now engaged in supporting this national mission-related work, along with the entire professional development center team. As a reminder, “national contribution” is the fifth domain within our strategic plan, a document that enables us to fulfill our organization’s mission and make significant steps toward realizing our vision. And, of course, that vision is that this country’s high school youth be fully engaged in their education.

The Eagle Rock Professional Development Center staff kicked off the spring by actively participating in a number of seminars, retreats, focus groups, workshops and educational events across the country, including the ones mentioned below. If you would like to know more about our work — or how your school or organization can work with the Eagle Rock Professional Development Center — please contact Dan Condon, our associate director of professional development, by emailing DCondon at EagleRockSchool dot org.

May 2 and 3

The Professional Development staff traveled to the Ryan Banks Academy in Chicago, helping to develop STEM and Humanities curriculum for the academy, which is an urban boarding school scheduled to open in September 2017.

May 2 and 3

Our staff also attended an advisory leader retreat to develop advisory vision and plans at Randolph Union High School in Randolph, Vermont.

May 4 and 5

We conducted asset-based observations and appreciative interviews with the staff of Continue reading…