The Coalition of Essential Schools (CES) EssentialVisions will release the third and final DVD in the series this November at the CES Fall Forum being held in Denver, Colorado. Eagle Rock will be featured in this final edition of the project. Each DVD captures how the Common Principles have been implemented, illustrating how students engage in their own education and how teachers develop as professionals. Focused segments include school tours of each campus, and benefits and challenges of implementing the principles in addition to the featured pedagogical pieces.
Eva Frank, Director of the EssentialVisions project explains, “What excites me about working with Eagle Rock is seeing a group of individuals on a continual quest to become better persons. That failure is deemed success if you learn from it and make changes going forward.”
A downloadable professional development toolkit provides discussion questions, schools documents, and lesson plans as tools educators can use to drive improvement. The first DVD: Classroom Practice captures the principles “less is more, depth over coverage” and “student as worker, teacher as coach”. The second DVD: Student Achievement captures the principles “personalization”, “demonstration of mastery”, and “commitment to entire school – teacher as generalist”. The third DVD, featuring Eagle Rock, School Culture captures the principles “tone of decency and trust”, “democracy and equity”. “goals apply to all students”, and “resources dedicated to teaching and learning”.
Eva continued, “The efforts at Eagle Rock can help educators understand that
intellectual, social, and emotional messiness is all part of the hard and rewarding work of developing character, passion, and civic engagement – for kids and adults! There is so much focus on control and power by single individuals in schools and Eagle Rock shows us that the most productive learning environments are ones where power is distributed to each member of the community.”
By viewing these DVD’s in their entirety or in individual segments over time, individuals are seizing the opportunity to reflect on topics most pertinent to educators today.
The DVD may be purchased beginning on November 1st here.
A short clip of the project may be seen here.
Learn about joining us for the premiere at 7.30 pm on Friday, November 9th in Denver here.