In his column this week, David Brooks writes, “this year, we’ve been so besieged by Donald Trump’s shriveled nature that we sometimes forget what full and courageous human life looks like.” In response, he introduces us to John Stuart Mill, who he says “demonstrated that democratic citizenship is a way of life, a moral stance …
Last week, I split my time between two groups. The first half of the week, Opal School hosted a Study Tour for a school from Miami Beach. On Wednesday, Susan and I went to Juneau, where we spent the remainder of the week working with another school staff. These are radically different demographic contexts: Other …
How might the process of creating, imagining, or inventing support the children’s sense of purpose and belonging in a community? This is one of the questions we included in our letter of intention. Playing with materials (and each other!) offers lots of opportunities for the children to make sense of the idea of community. We …
As Susan wrote in her recent post, Opal School staff gathered Wednesday to discuss their observations of times when children were being inventive. I was in a group with Caroline Wolfe, who described her observations with our youngest learners in Cedar classroom. At a fundamental level, she explained, the children in Cedar are inventing what …
With generous funding from The Lemelson Foundation, Opal School is embarking on an exciting journey this fall to research Invention Education alongside our friends and colleagues at Project Zero of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Ben Mardell and Mara Krechevsky. The task in front of us right now is to frame our research questions. …
Dear Intermediate Community families, At Opal School, we see all children as competent citizens with rights. We see them driven to connect, eager to empathize and be understood. We know that the arts are powerful pathways to develop understandings of ourselves, each other, and complex ideas. We value increasing proficiency with the conventions of communication …
Read more “Intentions: Interdependence and perspective taking”
The fourth- and fifth-graders in Opal 4 have been stretching out, finding ways that their gifts can address the world’s needs. Many of their stories will be told at next month’s Symposium. Here, eleven-year-old Chase shares her project – and invites you to contribute. A couple months ago, my teacher, Susan, asked my class how …
Periodically, Opal School’s community of staff, parents, and children come together. Recently, the community tended to its outdoor space as the sun came out of hibernation. The children moved like a team over mounds of dirt and bark chips, fully engaged in their work. Inspired by the beauty of this moment, I stopped and pulled out …
My recent post, Say What You Mean, began as this post — but I got so tangled up in thinking about the relationship between knowledge and meaning and learning and relationship and power and vulnerability that I realized I’d better split these posts in two. In this post, I’ll share the experience I had recently …
The children in the Magnolia Room are exploring and playing with the idea of being an author and the purpose and intentions that go along with that prestigious title. Authors have many intentions as they share their voices, imaginations, lives and experiences. In their experience as both readers and writers, the children discovered that all authors work …