Looks like the Liberals in B.C. are seeing the light in expanding school choice.

Will Dalton follow Christy’s lead?? 

http://communities.canada.com/vancouversun/blogs/reportcard/archive/2011/02/14/christy-clark-s-education-vision-more-school-choice.aspx

Good list of options, but I need to be able to choose more than one.

Successful school looks like this-

Sustained mastery hour by hour is the appropriate goal of instruction.     

        It’s not students’ age or background that counts, but the conditions of their instruction.

        It’s not the amount of time they spend, but their efficiency of focus.

        As students see their effort get results, they buy into the process and gladly exert more.

        You have to insure a correct response at the start, that the student gets it right.

        Everyone has to understand it down to the smallest detail.

        Students must express their learning orally.

        They hear, say, and repeat bits of learning many times.

        They practice telling back their learning at distributed, expanding intervals.

        They review prior lessons to begin subsequent lessons.

        Each needs individual, personal feedback about the leading edge of their learning.

        They draw best from each others’ modeling.

        Welcome teacher initiative and build on it.

        Show teachers how to get the best results.

        Establish a supportive team spirit around a clear and valid model of learning.

        Glance at my initial paragraph again, would you? Read just the first couple lines. When you first saw them, were you thinking it couldn’t be done?  To the contrary, James Irwin Charter Elementary has blown the top off scores and made parents ecstatic! Now continue on to the rest of the paragraph: Nominating committees, news media, and lawmakers in Colorado—the ball is in your court. Do you notice what’s emerging in your midst or are you, like most states, content to be gripped by the century-long hypnotic spell of Progressive Education—which insisted that familiarity was enough and osmosis would achieve it? 

        It’s been a long time since US education has been poised for major change quite like it is right now. 

        John Jensen is a licensed clinical psychologist and author of The Silver Bullet Easy Learning System: How to Change Classrooms Fast and Energize Students for Success (Xlibris, 2008), and of Practice Makes Perfect: How to Rescue Education One Classroom at a Time, being published a chapter a week on this site.  He is glad to receive comments directly at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), and will email an ebook version of the titles above to anyone without charge upon request.

John Jensen has an interesting background.
“John Jensen began this book when applying some leadership ideas to a parish group as a Catholic priest in 1966. If the principles could be extended more broadly, he believed, society could be changed radically. He has since distilled several decades of experience into an explanation of how people can make changes in their own lives, neighborhood, city, or nation. He is a licensed clinical psychologist in Alaska and an educational consultant; is married with two children. “

http://www2.xlibris.com/bookstore/author.aspx?authorid=9751

I read the chapter excerpt, and to me it makes intuitive sense, and in his words, the children own that piece of knowledge. http://www2.xlibris.com/bookstore/book_excerpt.aspx?bookid=32329

Progressive learning, doesn’t allow the child to own a piece of knowledge. How could they own it, when knowledge is being given out in bits and pieces, and it is left to the child to sort it out on their own.

Perhaps things are changing here in Canada, when I read an article from the NP in BC. “According to the Canadian Dyslexia Association, it’s a myth that dyslexic people are learning disabled: “Usually they only become learning disabled because of ineffective teaching.”

http://www.canada.com/learning+difference/4287578/story.html

“Everything has to make sense to a child with dyslexia to get them onside with learning, she says.

At home, instead of asking them to do something as broad as “tidy your room, ” parents are better off specifically requesting they put toys back on shelves, make their beds and hang up their clothes.

In the classroom, they need specific and full instruction in order to understand what the teacher wants them to do and how to do it, perhaps down to whether to use pencil or pen.”

I bet that a dyslexic child in a classroom, employing John Jensen’s Silver Bullet techniques, would blossom.  Just like a parent in the article, who stated, “Duncan mother Michelle Martin says her son, now 11, has greatly benefited from this approach.

“It’s a complete turnaround,” she says. “I have been fighting with the school system since he was in kindergarten.”

The boy is now in a traditional public school and earning several Bs, not C- minuses, and his social life has improved in tandem.

“When he was struggling so hard with his reading, he had no patience for relationships,” Martin says.”

Note, the boy is now in a traditional public school.

O/T - I’d be interested in what parents and educators have to say about this latest “tool” that would see each student with his/her own laptop? Another flavour of the month or something truly useful to help improve learning?
http://diamond-valley-leader.whereilive.com.au/news/story/kids-tap-world-of-learning/