Critical Starting Point for Global Transformation
September 17, 2007
George Lucas Educational Foundation
edutopia is a true gift to humanity from the George Lucas foundation. I consider the book and the DVD to be a superb starting pointfor the necessary global transformation.
Chapter Nine discusses a dozen promising practices that work:
01 Peer Instruction
02 Cross-age tutoring
03 Bringing local experts into the classroom
04 Multi-age classrooms
05 Cooperative learning
06 Class-size reduction
07 Team teaching
08 Looping (teachers stay with same students for several years)
09 Block scheduling
10 Schools within schools
11 School teams
12 Community service
This is a superbly crafted multi-media teaching tool that every teacher, parent, and administrator will learn from and be strengthened by.
My only disappointment is that the book's sponsors and authors focused so narrowly on just the USA and how the wisdom in this book might be applied within our existing academic and vocational infrastructure. My own focus is on the five billion poor who do not have the time for 18 years of rote education. Simply by subsidizing cells phones and creating a global network of 100 million volunteers using Telelanguage.com, we could offer free education to the five billion poor, and our own population, “one cell call at a time.” Education is the only way we can create stabilizing wealth–this excellent book set its sights too low.
