By Leslie France Patterson

I made a cool connection this week: Cornerstone and my son Oscar were born the same year: 1999.  Oscar entered Miss Patty’s kindergarten class in 2004, and since then I’ve had the privilege of watching my son and his school grow, hit important milestones, and make remarkable changes.  He’s now in 8^th grade and will be graduating next spring, headed for new challenges in high school.  I can’t help but feel that our school has earned a right of passage of its own and is ready to reach new heights in fulfilling its mission, especially when I reflect on all that our community has accomplished since my family arrived.

In 2004, when the school was still very young, Miss Patty was teaching my son and his classmates methods for peaceful conflict resolution, while older CLC students and their teachers were participating in a demonstration in front of the capitol to save Joe Budd from disastrous funding cuts.  I was awed to see Cornerstone so boldly establish a commitment to social justice.

While Mr. Jason’s 4^th graders were out planting trees at Birdsong in 2008, the Middle School students were putting in hours at both the McCain and Obama headquarters, and thus embracing our commitment to a broad definition of diversity.  Meanwhile, back at school, we committed to green technology by adding solar panels and acquiring school busses that operate on bio-fuel.

And maybe one of our most important steps toward our school’s maturity came at the same time that our 5^th graders were publishing a video to raise money for Haiti after the horrific earthquake in 2009 – we launched the Annual Fund.  I’ve come to see our Annual Fund as an important milestone of growth because it enables us to find bigger and bolder ways to meet our mission.  I give because I believe in our mission, and I’ve come to see how it informs every new hire, program, field trip, acquisition, and curriculum choice we make at Cornerstone.

After nine years here at CLC, it’s clear to me that our mission lives in our children.    When I hear Oscar patiently explaining to my 85 year-old mother, who recently had a stroke, how Google Maps works, reassuring her that we will arrive to our destination on time, I see Cornerstone.  I see Cornerstone when he, as a matter of course, designates a trashcan next to his homework area specifically for recycling papers.  And I see Cornerstone when I hear the excited little voice of a former reading buddy calling from the East House porch, “Hi Oscar!”

I’m certainly proud of the qualities my 8^th grader has developed at Cornerstone. But I’m also proud to have been a part of the growth of our school, and to have shared in the opportunity to build a learning community that will contribute to the “body, mind and spirit” of children for many years to come.

What makes our kindergarten unique?  Look here at an excerpt from Ms. Patty’s Friday News from the second week of school:

Our second week in Kindergarten has been a busy and productive one. We are continuing to build a class family by stressing the importance of being kind. We are also learning to better communicate our feelings using the “peace chairs.” We are having “silent time” in our morning circle and discussing ways we can calm ourselves and feel peaceful. Our intention in these and other class rituals is to help the children learn ways of negotiation and self regulation. These skills will not only help them develop as good citizens but are also needed for optimal growth as learners.

A few times a month, 2^nd grade receives a very special visitor, our own Ms. Bev.  Ms. Bev speaks to us about the Core Virtues in a unique and helpful way.  This week she referenced Jon Muth’s The Three Questions and spoke to us about the word “evidence.”  2^nd grade defined the word using the context Ms. Bev provided for us. Ms. Bev then asked us if we could find “evidence” in our classroom showing the Core Virtues were important to us.  We found them referenced in a few special places. Ms. Bev then helped us reflect about evidence showing the Core Virtues live in our core. What are external ways we can show the virtues in our core?  How might our preschool reading buddies see the virtues in our core?  The children gave examples of compassionate, respectful, responsible ways they could interact with their young friends.  Be ready to see evidence of the beauty that lives in our core!

Middle Schoolers, from days of yore, just before going on stage for the all school play.

There’s an often spoke truism at the intersection of neuroscience and education: Practice makes permanent.

It refers to the process by which the brain makes connections between neurons. Neurologist turned educator, Judy Willis, defines this “neuroplasticity,” as “as the selective organizing of connections between neurons in our brains.”

Author Sara Bernard expands on the topic of neuroplasticity on edutopia.com:

This means that when people repeatedly practice an activity or access a memory, their neural networks — groups of neurons that fire together, creating electrochemical pathways — shape themselves according to that activity or memory. When people stop practicing new things, the brain will eventually eliminate, or “prune,” the connecting cells that formed the pathways. Like in a system of freeways connecting various cities, the more cars going to certain destination, the wider the road that carries them needs to be. The fewer cars traveling that way, however, the fewer lanes are needed.

The fascinating thing to me is that this process goes on throughout our lives, and effectively debunks some rampant myths about the brain. Sara Bernard listed several of the more culturally embedded myths that shape how we view teaching and learning:

• The brain is static, unchanging, and set before you start school.
• Some people are left-brained and some are right-brained.
• We use only 10 percent of our brains.
• Male and female brains are radically different.
• The ages 0-3 are more important than any other age for learning.

The research that debunks these myths should inform how we approach classrooms, students, and even ourselves as educators and parents. If the brain continuously creates and prunes neural pathways throughout our lives and if practice makes permanent, what do we want to create, practice and make permanent?

As I reflect on my 11+ years with Cornerstone Learning Community I see that we began answering that question a long time ago. Our students practice applied learning in which they employ developing skills in novel situations to solve real problems. One such example is our long-standing tradition of service learning through which projects have ranged from lobbying to ecosystem restoration to feeding the homeless to raising money for victims of natural events.

What’s more, our students garden, collaborate, think, build, read, write, compute, run, play, laugh, imagine, create, struggle, fail, succeed, help, apply, dream, and chase those dreams. These practices are encouraged in the context of we adults who model these behaviors ourselves.  Teachers as leaders. Parents as partners. And all as learners.

As I begin to look to the next stage of my career, leaving CLC as a teacher (though not as a parent), I am excited for the practices of CLC made permanent in me during my years of service.  I also look forward to the practices yet to come as new ideas cross-pollinate with old ones, both for me and for the school.

Thank you, CLC, for an amazing ride.

Two students make final adjustments to solar car during time trials.

By Karen Metcalf, Middle School Lead Science Teacher

Middle school this week has been an interesting place. Were you to have placed a few hidden cameras and microphones around campus, this is what you might have seen and heard.

“Do you have magnet wire? My windmill needs some to light the bulb.”

“Have you ever used a drill before? No? OK, first get some goggles…”

“What materials do you need for a Stirling engine?”

“Can I use this plywood to cut a parabola for my energy project?”

“Guess what, the solar oven is at 165 degrees Fahrenheit.”

“Can I look at that under the microscope before school starts?”

“That solar car is so fast!”

A student experiment to create bio-gas.

Students have been working on projects of their own design in preparation for Cornerstone’s Energy Fair to be held on April 19. I’ve taught students how to use power tools, encouraged brainstorming on new designs for renewable energy devices, acquired a bucket of cow poop, searched the tool kit for dozens of things, purchased dowels, metal rods and  LED bulbs, and scoured my garage for leftover wood, nails, wire, bulbs, cans, and more.

You might think there’s no rhyme or reason for these snippets of conversation and lists of supplies, but it’s for the greater good. These disparate topics are encouraging our students to be creative, solve problems of the real world and gain new skills. Pursuing the answers to challenging problems takes more than rote memory or following directions, it requires deep learning and application of that knowledge.

Perhaps most importantly, it gives our students confidence that they have significant contributions to make to the community. And experience doing so.

A student takes samples from "aged" fast food.

Your hidden camera would have also shown you the results of letting kids really engage with projects in the curriculum. Solar car wheel class students (past and present) designed and built cars that competed in the CLC Solar Car Time Trials. These cars showed that a genuine challenge can lead to remarkable results and an understanding of the underlying principles of motion, gear ratios, electronic circuits and the like. (Congratulations to Zachary, Christopher and Dominick – winners of the CLC Time Trials. Thanks also, Charlie Witmer, for your inspired leadership and vision in teaching them.)

So, I hope you don’t perceive what you see on your hidden camera webcast as chaos. I can assure you that there is deep learning going on here. It’s tiring to supervise these many things at once, but at the end of the day, I sleep well knowing that the results will be their own reward (and because I know if I don’t sleep, I won’t make it through the day tomorrow).

What we know about the future is that we know very little about the future. The paradox of life is that the only thing that doesn’t change is the fact that things change.

Kindergartener demonstrates her numeracy thinking during a one-on-one performance based assessment.

In thinking about the changing landscapes of business, international relations, and climate, it becomes clear that our students will need a diverse set of applicable skills in both the short and long terms. As a result, when we think about how to “school” them for future success, we must think about transferable skills.

Transferable skills are those that can be applied in various fields of study and/or work. These are skills that make it possible for an individual to change careers and immediately contribute at a high level. Or to enter a new situation—be it high school, college, or career—and not just survive, but thrive.

Tony Wagner, who is the Innovation Education Fellow at the Technology & Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard Graduate School of Education, has developed a set of seven “Survival Skills” he sees as essential for today’s students in tomorrow’s world. He writes, “These skills are the same ones that will enable students to become productive citizens who contribute to solving some of the most pressing issues we face in the 21st century.” 

These skills are:  

1. Critical thinking and problem solving – The ability to apply knowledge and skills toward finding solutions in novel contexts.
2. Collaboration and Leadership – The capacity to work in teams to identify, analyze, and address challenges.
3. Agility and Adaptability – Possessing the mental flexibility to effectively “read” the landscape, incorporate new information, and change course as needed.
4. Initiative and Entrepreneurialism – The inventiveness and ingenuity to envision new approaches, strategies, and ideas, and the resolution to try them, and learn from their failures or successes.
5. Effective Oral and Written Communication – Proficiency in translating ideas and research into coherent content accessible to others in meaningful ways.
6. Accessing and Analyzing Information – Focusing beyond simple factoids to find, understand, and incorporate new information through the use of the brain’s executive functions.
7. Curiosity and Imagination – The deftness to leverage divergent thinking to ask questions, innovate, and envision the tackling of big ideas.

Such skills run the gambit of professions for which they are essential. Doctors, lawyers, professors, teachers, organizers, leaders, writers, perpetual students, and any and all careers and lifestyles in between, benefit from practitioners who possess and employ these skills. In fact, such practitioners are the innovators, the change agents, and the learners best suited to shape the world to come.

What does it take to foster these skills, to cultivate them in our students?

Well, it doesn’t mean we shun the knowledge and skills that accompany a more traditional approach to education – facts, information, grammar – but rather, it means we leverage them differently. Memorized facts are not the ends, but the means. Knowledge, information, and basic skills become the tools that help students construct an understanding of the world and how to interact with it.

Unpack the types of projects happening across the CLC landscape and you will find these skills embedded deep into the work. They are the cornerstone of the Cornerstone curriculum, if you will. From the integrated, multi-modal exploration of narratives in preschool to the student-initiated interstate service projects in middle school to the inquiry-based science experiments in middle elementary, knowledge is employed, but it is the seven survival skills that are learned.

In this way, we see the whole child at work—engaged, supported, challenged, safe, and healthy—and ready to face the challenges of the 21^st century.

Quite often, I find myself answering the question, “What kind of school is this?” Usually, it comes after I mention something I did with my students, like washing eggs or planning meals at the local grocery store.   After describing Cornerstone, an expected follow up question is always, “Well, how do you think they will do when they leave your school?” With complete certainty, I can bet they are going to do pretty well.

Our middle school students have been involved in learning and service projects of all kinds:  reading buddies, community cooks, archery, spelling bees, theatre, solar car races, and science competitions are just a few of the activities we will participate in this year.

Each year, the middle school list of extracurricular and competition-based programs expands, allowing our students to exercise their physical and academic capabilities in various settings.  Why? Academic learning is only as valuable as a student’s ability to apply the things they have learned to various situations.  At Cornerstone, the teachers are interested in seeing this happen with paper and pencil, projects, and academic challenges in the classroom, but sometimes we need another setting.

Our middle school provides a continuation of the student-centered learning our PreK through 5^th grade students experience, and continues to infuse academic rigor into the curriculum. This is manifested every year through the accomplishments of our students. We have students who are:

• Leon County History Finalists
• Holocaust Art & Essay winners
• Top 10 state finalists in National Geographic Bee
• Top 5 in Leon County Spelling Bee
• Solar Car competition winners
• Duke Talent Search qualifiers

And that is just the students who choose to enter.  The middle school faculty can be certain that, when students leave 8^th grade, they have mastered many and varied concepts, and are on par with or exceed the level of their peers at other schools. We have seen them solve puzzles, take tests, challenge the material we present, ask what comes next, and develop skills of responsible citizens.

Cornerstone is beyond compare in the way students drive the curriculum and experience their learning. Iit is good to know that beyond our boardwalk, students are armed with the skills and ability to be flexible, open-minded problem solvers.

Here’s a sneak peak of the CLC’s forthcoming winter newsletter. Please feel free to leave your comments, reflections and suggestions in the comments below. Cheers.

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about a series of questions Roland Barth posed during an institute (Improving Schools: The Art of Leadership) I attended a couple of summers ago at the Principals’ Center at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

“When was your learning curve off the chart?” he asked. “What were the principle elements of that experience that made it so powerful?” And, ultimately, ”What conditions lead to transformative learning experiences for the majority of students?”

5th grade students graph results of greenhouse gas experiment

The questions were intended to guide us toward some universal truths about lasting and transformative learning. My fellow participants and I listed learning curve periods from our lives that included excitement, challenge, and even survival. From these myriad experiences, we distilled some commonalities that underlie transformative learning: engagement, relevance, personal commitment, community, novelty, investment, purpose, desire, camaraderie, necessity, inspiration and immersion.

The next questions probably come as little surprise. “How do we bring these sorts of opportunities to classrooms? How do we make schools transformational for students, teachers and the broader community? What conditions ensure students have learning curves off the charts?”

To answer these questions, I turn to the Transformational Change Model developed by the Q.E.D. Foundation. (You can view it larger by clicking the image on the left or by clicking here.)

It lists 22 school categories and what each looks like in Traditional, Transitional, and Transformative learning environments. As you look at the transformational column you may find, as I did, that CLC meets many of the conditions necessary. For a sampling, I’ve highlighted five categories (in italics) and the quality that makes it transformative (in bold), and how CLC is doing it.

Context for Learning: Learning Community. We are, by name and action, a Learning Community. Parents, teachers, administrators, Board of Trustees, and students all commit to learning as a lifelong endeavor. The goal: ensure curiosity survives and thrives throughout “schooling.”

Where Learning Happens: Everywhere. Teachers utilize resources far beyond the classroom to engage students in inquiry, service, and civic action on campus and off.

Content: Whole Child. To borrow the 5 tenets of whole child education from ASCD, students at CLC are healthy, safe, engaged, challenged and supported.

Goals: Learner Aspirations and Life Options. Teachers shape, adjust, and tailor curriculum to meet the needs and interests of the students in each class to ensure it is relevant to their lives. Students have opportunities to lead in the design, research, and implementation of service learning projects related to social justice, environmental restoration, and elder care.

Educator Development: Collaborative Inquiry. Teachers work in teams to employ the lesson study model to improve practice.

Think about some of the times in your life in which your learning curve was off the chart, consider what you want to see for your and our children, and let’s work together find a way to bring about even more powerful learning experiences for all community members.

Kindergarten Core Virtue Quilt

You may have seen the quilt that hangs in the kindergarten classroom. Its tree design branches out into Cornerstone’s seven core virtues: respect, compassion, honesty, self-discipline, perseverance, responsibility, and giving. Eight years ago, small hands lettered those burlap branches, cut handprint-shaped leaves from favorite outgrown t-shirts, inked patches of happiness to surround them and discovered how, layer upon layer, a quilt grows warm. Many of the five-year-olds who helped make that quilt will graduate from Cornerstone this year.

Reflecting on that group’s time here makes me realize the amazing potential our school has for truly accomplishing perhaps the most essential aspect of a child’s education: character development. Whenever students enter CLC, they encounter the core virtues as words and then begin to piece together countless experiences of recognizing what these words mean in action. Every day, the social fabric of our learning here presents students with opportunities to actively practice ethical interaction while their teachers stand ready to raise awareness of how we are good and how to learn from mistakes. This regular cycle of awareness, practice, and reflection can instill virtue.

In addition, every year classes launch long-term community service projects that over time become memorable motifs for what it’s like to be virtuous. When the eighth grade class was in first grade, they felt the responsibility of making the rounds to collect attendance slips for the office. The next year, they made monthly visits giving time and joy to their elders at Woodmont. Another year, their compassion for homeless pets fueled a craze of lemonade-selling to support the animal shelter. By middle school, these students are able to anticipate the ethical challenges of a situation (such as camping together for three days) and make plans to use their understanding of each core virtue to guide their decisions.

Families form the stabilizing third leg of this endeavor. Perhaps the student-teacher-parent triad is never more powerful than when we undertake the instilling of virtue. It’s exciting to imagine, and to actually witness, the outcome when a school such as ours honors and empowers the child, supports and inspires the teacher, and welcomes the family as a partner. When I look at each eighth grader – whether I’ve known them since they were age one or twelve – I see such amazing growth! It gives me confidence in what we are up to here at CLC and hope for where following our mission can still take us.

What our school community has come to aim for and practice has many parallels with the seven guiding principles expressed in a “Character Education Manifesto” (1996) from Boston University’s School of Education, Center for Character and Social Responsibility. It asserts that “True character education is the hinge upon which academic excellence, personal achievement, and true citizenship depend.” The manifesto

•  recognizes that education is an inescapably moral enterprise
•  affirms the role of parents as moral educators
•  links character education to the development of virtues
•  calls for mission-minded faculty and staff to be role models
•  sees schools as communities
•  values the history, literature, and arts curricula as a reservoir of wisdom, and
•  charges students with the responsibility to forge their own characters

(You can find the full manifesto here.)

Last month our faculty took time to share with each other some of the ways that the virtue of respect is talked about, practiced, and reflected upon during school. This month we’re doing the same kind of sharing about compassion. It’s one way to keep this common language alive in our community and examine how experiences get stitched together over the years. I imagine that when the same language appears during family time, our three-layered efforts can be as warm, strong, and beautiful as a handmade quilt.