The Boston Evening Academy's Community Interviews: Making Learning Meaningful Through Intergenerational Dialogue

Fellowship Paper

The Boston Evening Academy's Community Interviews:

Making Learning Meaningful Through Intergenerational Dialogue

By Ryan Richard Oliver

The Boston Evening Academy
(Note: In 2004, The Boston Evening Academy changed its name to
The Boston Day and Evening Academy)

Massachusetts Charter School Fellowship Program

2001

Introduction

"You teach when?!" This is a typical response when I mention to people that I work at an alternative public school where all classes are held in the evening. Now entering its fifth year as a Horace Mann Charter School, The Boston Evening Academy (BEA) serves a slightly older population of students most of whom are either working or parenting full-time during the daylight hours. Though many have not found success in their previous school the reasons for this relate more to attendance and disengagement rather than innate capacity. Many, though not all, enjoy greater success at BEA, a result, they often say, of the positive relationships they have with teachers and staff, the relevant topics studied in class, and opportunities for learning outside the classroom.

Realizing the success of forays beyond the walls of the classroom and even school, we have committed ourselves to experimenting with various practices that encourage and require students to learn outside the classroom. Urban labs--educational field trips to community lectures, forums, and events--have been a hallmark of the school's curriculum from the beginning, and the increased emphasis on community service has greatly expanded the scope and variety of student learning outside school hours. In the past year, for example, a team of teachers piloted an innovative project; they took students to New Hampshire for an interdisciplinary study of the White Mountains ecosystem. My own contribution to this whole school focus is an experiment with a practice I first experienced when I was a high school student: the community interview.

In brief, this practice aims to re-contextualize the knowledge and information we present in schools. This is accomplished through students interviewing members of the local, national, and even global community, individuals who are actively engaged in their work. This method is philosophically grounded in a return to the notion of education as a process of storytelling, apprenticeship, and mentoring by a variety of adults in the community. The method is also consistent with modern day research on teaching and learning and is based upon years of practice in a variety of educational settings. While the potential benefits of the practice are numerous, community interviews are particularly well suited to addressing the fundamental need to bolster student retention of content knowledge, information, and the skills utilized across disciplines. Simultaneously it forges intergenerational connections.

Before describing in detail the process I have used to prepare for, conduct, and reflect upon these interviews, I will share some history of my own learning and teaching, adaptations I've made of the practice, and its grounding in research. Next, I provide examples of how this practice has been used, including anecdotal evidence of its success. Finally, I address obstacles that might arise in transferring this method to other contexts, as well as how these might be overcome.

* * *

From my earliest years I always loved school. However, sometime in the spring of my sophomore year of high school I became dissatisfied and began to lose some of the joy that had always been part of my educational experience. Unsure of precisely what was lacking in the large, primarily traditional, public school I attended, I went looking for an alternative. What I found was Mount Madonna (MMS), a small, non-denominational, private school, nestled in the Santa Cruz redwoods with a radical concept: make school part of life, by focusing on the meaning and purpose of knowledge rather than merely its acquisition.

An especially inspiring component of my two years at MMS was participating in the school's tradition of conducting interviews with prominent members of the local, national, and global community. During my junior year we took a break from our American History text to do a study of Mexican history, politics, and culture. The study served as preparation, as after it we traveled to Mexico City for a weeklong experience of meeting and interviewing various people from the curator of the national museum, to a prominent architect, to a local doctor.

Participating in this experience, and many others like it closer to home, had such a positive and profound effect on my intellectual, emotional, and moral development that I have incorporated the practice of community interviews into my current work as a Humanities teacher at The Boston Evening Academy, also a small school utilizing an alternative approach but with a vastly different student population. The results of using this practice in both environments have been extremely positive, and I think it would be intriguing to attempt some adaptation of this model in a larger, more "traditional" educational setting.

The practice can be used in two ways, depending on the flexibility of the school curriculum and the aims of the particular teacher. In one method the teacher builds the entire course around the exploration of values in American thought using the "Values in American Thought Curriculum," a product of twelve years of experimentation at Mount Madonna School. (For more information and samples of this pilot curriculum contact Mr. Ward Mailliard via e-mail at wardkranti@earthlink.net). In the other, the interviewing practice is used as a supplement and to enhance curricula developed or used by the classroom teacher. In either case the essence of the interviewing practice itself remains unchanged.

Before proceeding I'd like to include a brief note. A few statements regarding possible content choices will be mentioned below (in discussing examples of success). But my primary aim in this paper is to explicitly describe the method of guiding students through the process of conducting group interviews with members of the community, and the vast and multi-layered benefits to be derived from incorporating such a practice into any curriculum. Much of the appeal and value of this method derive from its compatibility with nearly any curriculum, regardless of subject or content. The principles behind it remain valid and accessible whether one uses it in the teaching and learning of Government, Biology, Algebra, or Literature, to name only a few options.

Supporting Research

Given the intense pressure to enable students to succeed on such standardized and concrete forms of assessment as the MCAS and SAT I, some educators may be concerned that engaging students in the practice of interviewing is impractical. They need only examine current research relating various teaching methods to rates at which students retain content taught. According to the "Learning Pyramid" published by the National Training Laboratory (NTL) in Bethel, Maine, students retain only 5% of what is taught through lecture and a mere 10% from what they read. Even supposedly innovative methods incorporating the use of audiovisuals, demonstrations, and/or discussion groups yield only 20, 30, and 50% retention, respectively. In contrast, learning by doing (which is what community interviews are all about), or as the NTL calls it, "Practice by Doing," yields retention rates of up to 75%. When taken to its full potential, by engaging students in the teaching of others, retention rates soar to as much as 90%. (National Training Laboratories)

Merely covering material is not only boring (for educators as well as students), but also, and more importantly, it's ineffective. Even if we accept, or are forced to settle for, the minimalist aim of helping our students pass the gauntlet of standardized tests necessary for their graduation and entrance into the college of their choice, the practice of community interviews provides a superior means of ensuring they will actually retain the content in question long enough to put it to even this, rather limited, use.

Of course, any educator employing the practice of community interviews must do the challenging work of connecting particular content with the experiential components. Moreover, once this work is done, there's no guarantee that given the time required to prepare for, conduct, and reflect upon these interviews, all the desired content will be covered. Nonetheless, if an educator is to embrace the practice fully they will almost certainly have to first accept the premise that "less is more," Principle #2 of the Coalition of Essential Schools. That Principle states:

The school's goals should be simple: that each student master a limited number of essential skills and areas of knowledge. While these skills and areas will, to varying degrees, reflect the traditional academic disciplines, the program's design should be shaped by the intellectual and imaginative powers and competencies that the students need, rather than by "subjects" as conventionally defined. The aphorism "less is more" should dominate: curricular decisions should be guided by the aim of thorough student mastery and achievement rather than by an effort to merely cover content. (Coalition of Essential Schools)

Though certainly not a cure-all for the disconnect between generations that is endemic to our culture, research also shows that linking adults and young people makes significant strides toward a smoother integration of young people into the life and identity of the larger community. In their important work Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, Lave and Wenger (1991) emphasize the universality of learning. They describe it as a process of moving, in a spiraling manner, toward increasingly central participation in a community of people with particular skills and knowledge. Based on their research on apprenticeship in a variety of cultures, they claim that apprenticeships entail not only the acquisition of skills and knowledge, but also the formation of identities. In order for identities to be developed effectively, newcomers to a community must have access to living models of what it looks like to be a full participant that community. (Lave and Wenger 1991)

Lave and Wenger lament the prevalent model of the school as an isolated place separate from the life of the larger community and encourage exploration of other, more integrated systems for educating our children. I feel strongly that conducting interviews with various members of the adult community is one means of shifting this unfortunate dynamic. Rather than sequestering young people during their formative years, keeping them away from the wide variety of important members of the adult community (as is common in most traditional schools), the practice of community interviews allows for a meeting of generations in a meaningful context that will ideally lead to a more fluid and effective transition from one life stage to another.

Thus, on its deepest level, these interviews can provide the opportunity for students to access not only what interviewees know, but also who they are as people; students gain access to the life wisdom interviewees have garnered through experience. Through community interviews the links between generations, often strained or broken for many children who lack access to grandparents and other elders in the community, can be reconstructed and the difficult transition into adulthood eased. What's more, the communication that occurs will, in most cases, foster greater understanding on both sides, thus easing the tensions that exist between young and old.

The Practice of Community Interviewing

Separated into its constituent parts this practice includes:

1. Building a Base in Content (reading, discussion, vocabulary development, skill-building)

Use Essential Questions as a guide and model.
Essential Questions are questions that are fundamental to content, relevant to students' lives, and meaningful beyond the walls of the school. They should be interesting to both teacher and students, limited in number, and open-ended. Each term's essential questions serve to focus teaching and learning and provide interesting entry points from which to approach specific aspects of a larger curriculum. They are related to a larger, yearlong essential question. Examples of questions I have used in the past include: What makes a life worth living? What is the meaning of democracy? What is suffering, and why do people suffer? How does disease cause suffering?
Use course content in whatever way is appropriate
As stated earlier, community interviewing is highly adaptable to nearly any subject matter. Whenever possible, however, teachers should try to encourage students to ask questions in class, and they should allow open dialogue, which serves to enhance students' comfort with public speaking. The development of basic reading, writing, and critical thinking skills is also essential to the successful use of this practice (but outside the scope of this paper).

2. Developing Interviewing Skills

Students read, watch, and listen to examples of expert interviews.
Bill Moyers A World of Ideas Vol. I and II is an exceptional text and video set that can be used to educate students on the process of interviewing. Unfortunately, it is currently out of print, but copies are easily made if one can get a hold of the original. Another example of exceptional interviewing can be found in Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot's book, I've Known Rivers.
Students conduct interviews of one another.
Peer interviews can be fun and instructive. They are an ideal means of teaching how to structure interviews and how to write and deliver appropriate and useful questions. Students can be taught skills such as the use of a beginning, middle, and end, the use of open-ended questions, and the importance of a clear, confident delivery of questions.
Students conduct interviews of people in their lives outside school.
A typical assignment I give at various points throughout the year is to take some question or questions that we have been discussing in class (Essential Questions for the Term are excellent for this) and have students interview three people from three different generations. Students then write up the results in short essay form (1-1 ½ pages). The assignment can be developed further as well: students can conduct a longer interview with a person of their choice, using questions they develop themselves.

3. Preparing to Create the Interview

Students gather, or teacher provides, background information.
Students are best able to develop questions if they first know something about the past experiences, struggles, and accomplishments of the interviewee. The teacher can usually obtain helpful material from the person to be interviewed. A brief biography, resume, published writing, or other information can enhance preparation and help students develop ideas for questions.
Students formulate questions.
Once students have a grasp of content (the particular information on the person they will be interviewing), they can begin independently formulating questions. I have students create three questions, either for homework or in-class, and I follow-up by putting students in pairs or small groups to read and discuss their questions aloud. This allows students who are less vocal in the large group to have a voice, and it encourages collaboration.

4. Creating the Interview

Student pairs offer questions to the group.
Having student pairs offer to the group the questions they've developed is a means of building the interview collectively. It's also fundamental that the interview is constructed visually. I record the questions on a chalkboard or whiteboard, so they can be altered or rearranged easily. Moreover, while trying to remain true to the essence of the questions students suggest, I am never afraid to mold and shift language, with the aim of fostering the production of clear and direct writing. I often engage the class as a whole in thinking about how to reword or reorder any given question. Facilitation is essential during this process and provides a rare opportunity to model construction of sentences, word choice, and grammar, in a way that is public yet non-threatening (if done sensitively). Below are some particularly helpful activities the teacher can carry out in order to help students formalize their questions and build the interview:
- Ask questions to push thinking and clarification of questions.
- Edit with the class as questions go up.
- Refer to content read and discussed.
- Organize by category and ensure existence of a beginning, middle, and end.
Questions are assigned.
Ideally students should be allowed to choose the questions they will use questions they feel drawn to, are comfortable with, and/or questions to which they are personally invested in learning the answer. When pressed for time, I have assigned questions on my own, but I always take into account the particulars of the students involved, including not only who offered the question but also how comfortable each student is speaking publicly. Without exception, however, every student should be assigned at least one question!!!

5. Final Editing

Teacher and/or students type and make final edits to questions.
During this step the teacher or student further edits the questions, clarifies wording, and works to assure consistency within the group of questions. Given the realities of my school (not that different from most) where time is limited, I usually do this step myself, though it would be an excellent exercise to include one or more students in the process.
I put the list of questions generated in a logical order and place students' names next to those questions they will be asking (similar to a drama script). Such organizing and labeling is especially important when working with students who are just getting used to the practice. With more experienced students it would be interesting to lay out the questions in a general order, then give students the freedom to ask their question whenever they felt it was most appropriate. This would, I imagine, allow for a more natural flow to the experience, transforming it from a formal interview into more of a conversation (which is always more interesting).
Teacher prints out interview for each student, develops and hands out follow up reflection assignment.
Recently I have started providing a reflection assignment ahead of time, thus helping students understand that they are not only required to be present for the interview, they are responsible for what they learn in it. Given that we never know exactly what will occur during an interview, the reflection assignments are open-ended and general. Specific questions based on the actual content and experience can always be generated later and provided to students in the form of additional follow up assignments, quizzes, or questions for class discussion.

6. Interviewing

Students go to interviewees, if at all possible.
Given the aim of forging connections with the larger community and providing students with a glimpse of the adult world, it is especially important that students meet the interviewee in that individual's particular setting. While it is equally necessary that a wider variety of adults spend more time in schools, going to meet and interview a person where they live, work, or play, provides vital context and sets a tone that is often more powerful and focused than what can be created in school.
Students and staff dress appropriately for occasion.
Appropriate dress can be a point of contention. Invariably, the groans ensue when I request that students dress in a professional manner for an interview. The most common argument is as follows: "What we wear shouldn't matter. They should be able to accept us as we are and judge us by our words and actions." While I always empathize with their sense of fairness, I take the opportunity to discuss the realities of the world and the merits of understanding what forms of dress and behavior are appropriate in what context. Making the analogy between appearance and language use is instructive and well covered in recent works on urban education. As a rule I never tell my students that they are speaking wrong, but rather, I distinguish between language that is appropriate to school and professional settings and that which is appropriate with friends or at home. Like formal language, formal dress is not appropriate to every situation.
The varying economic circumstances that can affect a student's ability to "dress appropriately" is something else to be sensitive to. I have no direct advice other than that we should never embarrass students regarding their attire, regardless of the circumstance, and that questions should be asked before jumping to the conclusion that a student is merely being rebellious. From experience, I can say that not having the nice clothes that everyone else around you has is embarrassment enough.
Learn and teach appropriate skills of greeting and introduction.
The previous point, on appearance, is part of this step. In addition, engaging students in a discussion on greetings and introductions provides an opportunity to expand awareness about pluralism and diversity in terms of culture and custom.

7. Reflecting and Following-up

Students do written and oral reflections.
This is one of the most important steps in the process of doing community interviews; we skip it at our own peril. Experience has shown that it is very difficult for students to follow and assimilate an entire interview in one sitting. It is in the thinking, writing, and talking about the experience that the greatest strides are made in digesting the experience and incorporating knowledge and skills in meaningful ways. Such reflection should be done as soon after the experience as possible and can be greatly aided by video or audio taping the interview itself and reviewing it as a class.
Students write thank you letters.
Showing appreciation is essential to developing long-term relationships with members of the community and ensuring that people will participate in the future. It is also an excellent lesson for students. It is best when the students themselves write the thank you notes, with the teacher's guidance on form and appropriate content.
Students can create a written transcript of the interview.
Writing transcripts aids reflection and future teaching and can be used as a means of sharing the benefits with those who weren't able to be at the actual interview. What's more, writing (and reviewing) transcripts helps students consider how future interviews can be enhanced.
Students publish interviews in a book.
Publication can be done through desktop publishing or through companies specializing in low cost publication of educational materials (like BookTek in Woburn, MA, www.booktek.com). Once created, books can be distributed to students, parents, other schools, grantors, board members, and they can be used for future education and publicity.
Students write essays.
A more traditional exercise, writing essays can be an important and meaningful way for students to solidify what they have learned through the experience and re-integrate it into the more typical flow of school assignments and projects. They can highlight a particular theme in an interview, provide evidence from that and other sources, or, at more advanced levels, they can make connections and compare and contrast the ideas expressed in two or more interviews.

Other Ideas:

Create a Web site with transcripts and student reflections.
Have the class present on the community interviewing experience, perhaps at an all-school assembly or community forum.
Videotape the process.
Create a curriculum based on the interviews.

Community Interviews: the Practice in Context

Community interviews have been successfully practiced by divergent populations and in a wide variety of environments, providing clear evidence that the practice is transferable to other public schools. Ward Mailliard, one of my former teachers at Mount Madonna School (mentioned previously), created an entire curriculum using Bill Moyers' A World of Ideas Volumes I and II as the foundation for conducting interviews locally and as far away as Washington, D.C. and Cambridge, MA. This past year Mr. Mailliard's class focused exclusively on reading, discussing, and writing papers on the interviews selected for the curriculum; then, as a culminating project, they spent a week in Cambridge interviewing four Harvard professors, three of whom were featured in the World of Ideas series.

During their interview with Professor Sara Lawrence Lightfoot, a group of my students from the Boston Evening Academy joined in, creating a beautiful synthesis. The merging of these two groups, one primarily African-American and Latino students from some of the most economically depressed neighborhoods of Boston, the other white middle-class students from the west coast, was a mind opening experience in and of itself. The combination of students, coupled with a deep and honest conversation with a fine person, one with wisdom and a wealth of experience, made the experience almost magical. As a follow-up, students at Mount Madonna are working on the creation of a curriculum to compliment the interviews they did; they hope the curriculum will be used by future students at their school and by my students in Boston.

At BEA my own adaptation of the practice of community interviewing has taken numerous forms over the past two years. Early on I transformed the set-up into a debate format. Working on the student selected topic of "Capital Punishment" I spent a semester preparing, building up students' background knowledge of the subject through readings, discussions, and audio-visual presentations. During the fourth quarter I invited a State Representative and a public defender to debate the issue using a series of guiding questions prepared by my students. Using the same basic methods described above, we generated unique questions for each individual and questions for both to answer. Although we did not go off site for the actual debate, we invited the entire school to participate and ask questions following our planned piece. What resulted was a fiery and intense debate, though civil, that engaged the full attention of more than thirty students for nearly an hour and a half.

Using the information gained from this experience as well as their research over the course of the semester, my students performed public speeches of their own at our end of the year exhibition of student work at the Boston Center for the Arts. They were able to connect with two prominent members of the community and then foster further connections with those parents, friends, and supporters who were present at their presentations. Leading up to, during, and following these experiences I saw significant leaps in student excitement, about the topic and learning in general. While students were nervous about their ability to rise to the occasion, once they saw they could do it they became confident and excited about doing it again.

In another related exercise I used one of the World of Ideas interviews as supplementary material in my course Democracy and Social Change. Students studied the interview and a number of other sources (texts and multi-media) on democracy, politics, campaigns, and elections. They then interviewed local representatives of each major political party and thereby prepared for their own "Year 2000 Presidential Debates" project. Using the information and knowledge they gained, students (prior to the November 2000 election) wrote excellent campaign speeches and put on an amazing public performance for the school.

Most recently I used the practice of community interviews in my work to develop an interdisciplinary project around the topic, "Disease and Social Change." Using more traditional sources as background information, such as novels, histories, and scientific texts, my colleagues and I set up an interview with two prominent members of the Codman Square Health Center in Dorchester--Maryanne Kirkbride, Director of Public Health, and Dr. Bill Loesch, Coordinator of Teen Programs. We traveled to their work place (where students were given the opportunity to sign up for free health care), and students conducted an excellent interview--with style and professionalism. They gained important information regarding public health, the social and biological aspects of disease, and their interviewees' perspectives on suffering, all of which were incorporated into a required research paper on the disease they feel causes the most suffering in Boston. After the interview we shared a meal with our interviewees, allowing all present to interact on a more informal level. Feedback from both students and those interviewed was overwhelmingly positive, and once again the quality of students' year-end presentations showed their growth.

As a next step I am working to incorporate the practice of community interviews into a larger project aimed at connecting school and community through what we at BEA are calling "Community Action Education." Our aim is to unify some of our individual efforts in a program that would guide and fund students in choosing, researching, and addressing a pressing community issue in a way that fulfills their academic requirements. Ideally students will use the interviewing skills they have gained through past experiences and work to understand how members of the local community feel and think about specific issues. They'll also increase their awareness of and access to expert knowledge available in the larger community. One student, inspired by her experiences with the Lawrence-Lightfoot interview, is even considering creating and publishing her own book of interviews on the topic of education and urban youth; this project would serve as the central product of her Community Action Education Project. Many things still need to be worked out for Community Action Education to become a reality. But given our population and their concerns, linking our academic curriculum to an examination of the problems and questions that arise outside the school walls is a logical next step.

Potential Obstacles and Transferability

Primary obstacles that may impede the implementation of this practice are: lack of flexibility in schedule, lack of resources, or intense curricular constraints which value breadth over depth. Each of these obstacles may lessen the extent to which the practice might be implemented, but none of them, even if experienced simultaneously, would completely rule out the use and positive impact of the practice within a given school or classroom. A flexible schedule is, however, ideal when trying to include meaningful interactions and trips to visit people outside the school. Moreover, many students who are more kinesthetic learners are more engaged when they can leave the confines of the school building. Leaving the building gives them direct experience not only with the ideas and demeanor of the person interviewed, it also introduces the student to settings within the adult world. Without this flexibility, however, guests can, and have, been brought into the school building (within the limits of regularly scheduled classes) to participate in interviews.

Lack of resources may also reduce the ability to go off-site, but it should not inhibit the ability to draw participants. In seven years of involvement with this program, not one of our interviewees has ever requested or received any financial remuneration. Financial resources are needed, however, for the documentation and dissemination of the interviews, as adequate funds allow the interviews to be videotaped and even collected into a publishable book of transcripts. With limited resources, however, one could very easily tape-record and/or write up transcripts and then simply photocopy and publish through the use of a home computer.

Finally, the constraints of rigid curricular requirements may also block the practice from having its full effect. Students need time to delve deeply into the intense life questions that arise and to adequately prepare for an interview and debrief afterward. But given a time or curricular constraint, a smaller number of interviews could still be conducted, thus using the practice to enhance and bring to life the content examined throughout the year. The practice of community interviews can also be used as a culminating experience, to assess and deepen student learning.

Conclusion

The examples included in this paper represent only a few of the possibilities for the adaptation and transfer of this practice to other settings. Without fail, community interviews have proven to be exceptional experiences for all involved. Students who regularly participate in them have shown great strides in their acquisition of fundamental content knowledge, as evidenced in the quality of work they produce. Even more inspiring are the meaningful inter-generational connections forged in the process. None of this is possible without expanding not only our notion of what it means to educate, but also our definition of where a school's boundaries lie.

About the Author

Ryan Oliver is currently in his third year as a Humanities Teacher at the Boston Evening Academy--the first diploma granting evening high school in Boston. Born and raised in Santa Cruz, CA, Ryan traveled east for college, earning a degree in Social Studies from Harvard College in 1998 and a teaching credential through the Undergraduate Teacher Education Program (guided skillfully by Lissa Hodder) in 1999. His passion for education developed through years of watching his mother work to establish her own alternative school, intellectual conversations with his father, the supportive guidance of the Mount Madonna School and community, as well as through the modeling provided by such great teachers as Ms. Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, Mr. Ward Mailliard, and Mr. Baba Hari Dass.

References

Cushman, Kathleen, ed. 1989. Asking Essential Questions: Curriculum Development. Horace 5, no. 5. June.

Diaz, Yolanda, ed. 2001. Mount Madonna School and The Boston Evening Academy Interview with Professor Sara Lawrence Lightfoot at Harvard University. Watsonville, CA: Mount Madonna School. Duplicated.

Jensen, Eric. 1998. Teaching with the Brain in Mind. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Lawrence-Lightfoot, Sara. 1999. Respect: An Exploration. Reading, MA: Perseus Books.

____________. 1994. I've Known Rivers. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Lave and Wenger. 1991. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.

Mailliard, Ward. 1992-present. Personal communications.

Moyers, Bill. 1989. A World of Ideas, Volume I. Edited by Betty Sue Flowers. New York: Doubleday.

Moyers, Bill. 1990. A World of Ideas, Volume II. Edited by Andie Tucher. New York: Doubleday.

National Training Laboratories. Circa 1970. Learning Pyramid. Bethel, Maine: NTL.

Simon, Kathy, and Amy Gersten. The CES: A Principle-Based Approach to School Reform. Retrieved 30 October 2001 from the Coalition of Essential Schools Web site: www.essentialschools.org

Sousa, David A. 2001. How the Special Needs Brain Learns. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Ten Common Principles. Retrieved June 2001 from the Coalition of Essential Schools Web site: www.essentialschools.org

Go to: Fellowship Papers | How to Apply | Paper Guidelines || Whole School Papers

design by SolsticeSun Design