Reading Reflection 2- BPHS

Best Practice High School has three very improtant aspects that establish it as a fine academic instutition. The first is developing Powerful Teaching and Learning which establishes a collaborative approach between students and teachers making it easy for students to buy into their education. The more teachers and students communicate, the easier learning becomes. Second, is the aspect of Restructuring the School. They made sure the school stayed below 500 stduents ensuring that every student recieved the individual attention they need to be successful. Any more students and some of the student body may start to slip through academic crakes. Finnaly, Creating Curricular Paths to Success enables students to see connections between academic courses allowing them to get a full circle view of the "theme" they are studying.

Honestly, I found no practices that lead to any support of these topics at my first school. Everything was test based. Professionalism, ideals of themeatic units, powerful teaching, concepts outide the standardized tests were not even thought of beucase the test scores were all that mattered. In fact, teachers labeled students and limited them by profiling then established where they could or could not go beyond the boundries of high school. In fact, the school I was at is the model school used to establish why best practices was created.,

Reading Response 1-Rethinking High Schools

Like many books on education, I found this book offering some of the same language. Reforming, scaffolding, standardized tests, democracy and other buzz words that relate to creating a better school for students, teachers, parents and the community. Much of the language was used in a very general, idealistic approach to creating a school that was a community of students with diversity, strong test scores, and personal relationships.

The idea of Technology and materials that was breifly brought up is an idea that will not revolutionize the education of our youth. Technology is seen as this great tool and equlizer in academic circles, however, some major research institutions shy away from technology becuase they feel its usefulness to teaching students is limited. Technology does not make students stronger, but great teachers do.

One aspect that I thought was very important to reforming schools and educationb was class size. It is an old concept, but evryone knows that small class sizes create an environment more condusive to education then larger class sizes. In order to truely reform and improve schools, class size must be the first item addressed.

The concept one should focus on is the view that adolescence is a negative time filled with struggle, misery, and just an overall curse. Some students do strugle and never truely servive this processs, while other thrive and beat down this era of their lives. As educators, we should actively discover the issues that plague our students to help understand them and thier issues. Looking at the "times" is an anthropologist way to understand their culture and ultimatly the key ti understanding them.

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