Tag Archives: Noble Impact

Understanding Eagle Rock’s Work With Noble Impact

Since spring of 2013, staff members from our Professional Development Center have been working closely with the folks at Noble Impact in Little Rock, Ark., to help that organization develop its inaugural INSTITUTE program, which was held last summer in Arkansas. For the uninitiated, Noble Impact is a nonprofit committed to engaging kindergarten through 12th graders as they traverse the intersection of public service and entrepreneurship.

Noble-Institute-2Chad Williamson, the co-founder of Noble Impact, visited us here at Eagle Rock years ago and was impressed enough to come back last year to see if we could help his team by collaborating on the creation of curriculum for the first INSTITUTE program.

The INSTITUTE of Noble Impact is more than an all-caps nine-letter non-abbreviated acronym. It’s also a noble concept — and the first of its kind summer program with a single goal in mind. That purpose is to commit students to enact social change.

Now here’s where it gets weird. The idea is for these students to perform a noble public service while practicing entrepreneurship. Can anyone say oxymoron? Is this a conflict in philosophies? Helping others while helping yourself? How do these seemingly opposing philosophies meld into a single action with a combined purpose?

The INSTITUTE — working in concert with the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service — skillfully addresses the dialectic between public service and entrepreneurship. The challenge for students is to find practical approaches to “making a difference” in their community.

The weeklong summer program challenges INSTITUTE students to think about community issues, ideas for solutions — ultimately creating sustainable impact.

For our part, Eagle Rock’s Professional Development Center staff helped Noble think through its Continue reading…

Update From the Eagle Rock Professional Development Center

If our recent level of activity is any indication, Tolstoy was right… Spring is the time of plans and projects. And while the first day of spring is still 30 days away, as you’ll see, we’ve been hard at work tilling the soil, so to speak, so that the seeds we plant these next few months will bear significant bounty along the education landscape for quite some time to come.

To start things off, we recently played host to Xylem Larla Day, a graduate student in education from Cal State-Chino, who visited our Estes Park, Colo., campus to research teaching and assessment methods. In addition to pursuing a Masters degree in Education, Curriculum & Instruction, Xylem is in the midst of starting Earth Arts Academy – a community-oriented movement that aims to open an environmental high school in Nevada City, Calif., by fall 2016.

Eagle-Rock-Professional-Development-Center

Next up, our staff recently collaborated with IDEA (The Institute for Democratic Education in America) to design a tour in New York City for a group of 30 educators, youths, parents and community leaders from South Burlington, Vermont. Lead by former Eagle Rock Math Instructional Specialist, Jason Cushner – who now works with Big Picture South Burlington, a school-within-a-school at South Burlington High School – the group from Vermont was in search of tips, insights, strategies and tactics that may help in their efforts to shift their approach to graduating students from a seat-time requirements basis to a more proficiency-based system. Once the tour began, our role was to facilitate key reflection meetings and debrief the learning from the visits so that immediate action could occur back home in Vermont. And to help support the effort even further, a group from Eagle Rock will travel to South Burlington in mid-March to follow up with the Vermonters (more info on that trip appears below).

Moving on, upcoming visits we’re looking forward to hosting here at Eagle Rock under the auspices of the Professional Development Center (PDC) include:

  • A staff member from Washington Heights Expeditionary Learning (Washington, Heights, NY) will be visiting with our PDC staff as he explores ways to start up his own Expeditionary Learning School (i.e., a school that inspires the motivation to learn and transform urban, rural, and suburban education by empowering students and adults to become leaders of their own learning).
  • Staff from Holy Heart of Mary High School in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada, will be on campus this spring to learn how Eagle Rock works with ‘opportunity youth’ (i.e., young people who are both out of school and not working).
  • Staff from the Donnell-Kay Foundation will also be visiting Eagle Rock soon to learn about work with ‘opportunity youth.’ The foundation, which is committed to reforming and improving public education in Colorado through research, creative dialogue and critical thinking, is based down the road in Denver.
  • Staff from the Los Angeles Small Schools Center in California – a Coalition of Essential Schools member since 2006 – will be paying us a visit to learn about how they can support us in our work with the Los Angeles Unified School District.
  • Staff from North Carolina’s Voyager Academy return to Eagle Rock this spring to work on strengthening their internal professional development systems that are aimed at supporting their project-based learning high school.

News From The Eagle Rock Professional Development Center

PDC_Update_Sep:OctWe’re fresh into a new school year here at Eagle Rock and our Professional Development Center (PDC) has so many projects, plans and proposals in the works that we found it necessary to create a new position of PDC associate.

This new hiring signals our intent to increase the center’s national outreach and impact, contributing to — and accelerating — school improvement through strength-based approaches that support the organizations with which we partner and assist.

In fact, even as we write this, we’re interviewing candidates for the PDC position with hopes of having that new assistant ready to jump into a pile of projects right out the gate.

Below is a listing of our Professional Development Center’s activities scheduled from now through the Thanksgiving holidays. To inquire about working with the PDC, call Dan Condon at (970) 586-0600.

Sept. 24

  • Launching our Student-centered Coaching Initiative with Eagle Rock School, which is part of our annual professional development focus on student learning.
  • Hosting monthly directors phone call for the Coalition of Essential Schools (CES) centers nationally who are planning for the CES Fall Forum. At that conference, which runs Nov 8 and 9, we are presenting with other centers on implementing the Common Core, while staying true to the 10 common principles of CES. Eagle Rock is also responsible for convening CES center directors for their biannual meeting.

Sept. 24 – 25

Sept 26

  • Today, we’ll be facilitating further curriculum development and charter school application work with Noble Impact, an Arkansas-based organization that engages with scholars to pursue public service as entrepreneurs.

Oct. 4 – 5

  • We will be hosting and working with Colorado teachers who utilize the Facing History organization’s resources in their schools. If you’re unfamiliar with this Brookline, Mass.-based organization, it promotes the belief that education is the key to combating bigotry and nurturing democracy. Through a rigorous investigation of the events that led to the Holocaust – as well as other recent examples of genocide and mass violence – students in a Facing History class learn to combat prejudice with compassion, indifference with participation, and myth and misinformation with knowledge.

Oct. 8 – 10 

  • We will host and work with representatives from the Rochester (N.Y.) Teachers Association, with a focus on the ways that serious outdoor and wilderness activity, experiential learning and voluntary commitment to behavioral values might transfer to an urban setting where large numbers of students are disengaged in their own education.

Oct. 14 – 16

  • We’ll be working with three Big Picture Learning Schools in Detroit: Blanche Kelso Bruce Academies, East and West Campus, and Catherine Ferguson. These schools have adopted the Big Picture Learning model but have only a year under their belt with this approach. We are being engaged to coach staff on how to make sense of and work effectively within this model.

Oct. 15

  • We will be working with Health Leadership High School in Albuquerque to facilitate the development of their professional development systems. Specifically, we will introduce them to the use of protocols as a way to foster continuous improvement with their project-based learning approach.

Oct. 17–18

  • Here, we’ll be working with South Burlington High School in South Burlington, Vt., to facilitate integration of the Common Core State Standards in the school’s Math and English departments. We’re looking forward to seeing Jason Cushner, a former math instructional specialist here at Eagle Rock, who is now a Rowland Fellow charged with leading systemic change in schools. Jason is working on getting schools to adopt innovative professional learning systems across the state of Vermont.

Oct. 25

  • We will be working with The Kingsbury Center in Washington, D.C., in an attempt to learn how to better practice differentiation in the classroom to apply to Eagle Rock School.

Oct. 29

  • Monthly CES (Coalition of Essential Schools) Directors call.

Oct. 30 (and Dec. 3)

  • Facilitating the launch of Puget Sound Consortium Critical Friends Group. This is a multi-year project to establish a network of secondary schools as a regional learning lab to improve long-term educational outcomes for Puget Sound, Wash., highest-need families. The focus is on student engagement as the strongest lever for increasing long-term success indicators such as college persistence, access to and preparedness for careers of choice, and non-cognitive attributes related to wellness and self and social efficacy.

Nov. 6

  • Eagle Rock is co-hosting the Rowland Conference and, following the keynote address we will be taking half of the attendees and running a workshop called “Managing the Rapids.” In the afternoon, we will take on the other half of the conference’s attendees so that by the end of the day we will have worked with an estimated 600 people. Our approach in these workshops is to employ the mindset and tools of “less is more.” Attendees will experience a set of processes that will help them get a handle on the various initiatives launched in their school setting and help get them under control within a clear framework. They will learn to move from confusion to disciplined focus and greater confidence, leaving the experience with a clear structure, aligned initiatives and focused strategy.

Nov. 8 – 10

  • Our entire PDC team, as well as some of our School’s staff, will be attending and working at the Coalition of Essential Schools (CES) Fall Forum. Two workshops are scheduled, including one in which our own Holly Takashima and Karen Ikegami discuss how notebooks can be used to evaluate growth and mastery in different disciplines. The second workshop features Ike Leslie presenting, “Queer!” “Privilege!” “Power!” – Strategies for Facilitating Real Conversations in School.” This workshop answers the question of how to create a safe space for students and staff to discuss how power and privilege affect their personal and learning experiences.

Nov 18-21

  • Big Picture Learning coaches will be at Eagle Rock and we will be facilitating their adoption of new strategies to add to their coaching toolkit. They are working on integrating material from their newly published book Leaving to Learn and deepening their use of design thinking processes in their work.

Nov. 20 – 22

  • We’ll be returning to Detroit for a second visit to work with Big Picture Schools.

 

Perspectives On The Professional Development Center At Eagle Rock

As the staff at Eagle Rock’s Professional Development Center know all too well, teachers often feel frustrated by the obstacles they face in building sustainable and effective educational relationships with their students. More frequent testing, district policies, or tight financial circumstances can all work against a committed teacher’s desire to put his or her students first. Sometimes, all it takes is a change of perspective to see the way past these obstacles, but that can be hard to do when one professional development consultant comes to a school, or district.

The new perspective is often seen as yet another obstacle: something added on to all we have to do. However, when you bring 4-5 different teams together, each with their own obstacles and each with their own perspectives–and when you add to that a fabulous mountain retreat setting that literally elevates their thinking–very interesting things can happen.

This June, I had the opportunity to do just that at Eagle Rock’s Professional Development Center. Director of Professional Development, Michael Soguero, invited me up from my home in the foothills to work, specifically, with Chad Williamson from Noble Impact, a promising Arkansas start-up. Chad’s looking to help high school students blend entrepreneurship and public service with the help of the Clinton School of Public Service and the Walton School of Business. That alone would have been a fascinating experience. Chad’s wrestling with two highly successful visions of opportunity for America’s youth, and trying to identify the threads that unite them at the individual, group and team level of service. The different levels of this challenge are at the heart of his model and, working with Chad and Eagle Rock staff Dan Condon (Associate Director of Professional Development) and Collin Packard (Public Allies Teaching Fellow in Professional Development), we were able to hammer out two weeks’ worth of curriculum that we’re confident will lead to action, first in Arkansas and then, hopefully, around the country.

A lot of what happened, however, was rooted in the other perspectives that were in and out of our work sessions, community gatherings, and evening activities. Eagle Rock’s recent decision to mix perspectives by hosting multiple site visits simultaneously worked wonders. Staff from Valemont Secondary School in the heart of BC’s controversial tar sands “patch” could empathize with the challenge of motivating students to see the value of working for the public good, locally. Scholars and field workers from the Continue reading…