Project Learning in Portland, Maine

In today’s School Spotlight, State of the Re:Union shares a video showing the great progress and success of Edutopia‘s  hands-on learning technique being used by one now-thriving school in Portland, Maine. (To view original web page, click here. To watch Edutopia’s video, view below.)

King Middle School paint a challenging picture: 54 percent of the student population receiving free or reduced lunches, around 25 different languages among its students, and a limited English language proficiency of 26 percent. However, these students are testing above every district and state average levels in every curriculum area at every grade level.

Ask what the secret to their success is, they will say it is because they follow a curriculum design of “expeditionary learning, integrated studies and 1-to-1 laptops.” In other words, the students and staff of King Middle learn about real experiences through the process of doing them. They learn about the ups and downs and interaction between others and necessary relationships that it takes to make something work in the real world — their world.

A group of teachers customize project models with an intended goal and finish date in mind for students that incorporate the use of science, math, media graphics, social studies, the arts, and many other subjects.  Just like in the real world, these students must complete their tasks within an allotted time frame. (An eight to 12 week time frame.)

To help students, community members who are professionals in these fields are brought in to assist through guidance and answer questions. This helps students understand the necessity in forming relationships and help forge important communication skills.

Once students are ready to present their finished products, the community attends the “Culminating Event” where they engage with students who are there to explain the completed project and how the results were achieved. The students display not only their projects, but developed skills of “creativity, cooperation, and problem solving” — all which are invaluable tools they can and will use throughout their lives.

This hands-on approach is helping the children and teachers, and what is more impressive is that students are learning to use critical thinking skills. Getting students (and teachers in many cases) engaged can be a daunting task, but King Middle has found a formula that is working for their students, teachers, families and community.

Know of a school who is using a different learning system to engage students, teachers and community? Use the box below to tell us what they are doing and how it is working for them.

In 2003, Gladstone, Missouri, faced some difficult challenges—an aging population, strict boundaries that prevented physical growth, declining revenues, a declining business environment and inadequate city services. There was only one ambulance and two paramedics to provide emergency services and no place to house the city’s recreational programs for youth.

With technical assistance from Derek Okubo, a former National Civic League vice president who now works as Director of Human Rights and Community Relations for the city of Denver, more than 150 citizens participated in the community effort known as “Gladstone on the Move…Citizens Making a Difference.”

The group identified six key performance areas or KPAs: Business/Economic Development, Neighborhoods, Community Center, City Services, Education, Identity/Regionalism. The group researched and discussed the issue and came up with a list of priorities.

Gladstone on the Move came up with a plan that could be used to guide the city over the next 20 years. Next step: create an implementation committee to figure out a timeline and an action plan for achieving the desired results.

The citizens themselves recommended Gladstone’s first ever property tax increase to the city council, also to extend a sales tax that was about to expire to pay for parks and recreation needs. The council put the tax increases on the ballot and Gladstone on the Move campaigned to get them passed.

The community now has a complete ambulance service that is fully staffed, not only basic life support for getting people to a hospital but advanced life support for people suffering heart attacks, strokes and other medical emergencies.

It also has a marketing program. It is building more sidewalks than ever before. It has a comprehensive street lighting program, three major economic development initiatives, several hundred square feet in retail and several thousand in housing units with an affordable housing philosophy.

With the parks and recreation sales tax, they invested $1.3 million in an existing outdoor pool to make it a family event center, the city constructed a $25 million community center in partnership with the nearby school districts, complete with indoor recreation pools and the fitness area and the conference rooms and all that. It also has a competitive swim arena used to host the high school swim competition.

The point here is not that taxes are good and every community should raise them. The point is, if you have these needs and desires: a recreation center, a better ambulance service, an economic development plan, more street lighting, you need to figure out how to pay for it, and it helps to have that conversation out in the open with members of the public taking the leading role.

There can be little doubt that these tax proposals could easily have failed without the Gladstone on the Move process.  As one local official put it, “When you involve people and you listen and you take action, positive outcomes result.”

Gladstone was an All-America City Award winner in 2008. The Gladstone on the Move process won a Program Excellence Award from the International City/County Management Association in the strategic planning category.

Use the box below to tell about people in your community who are rallying together to make improvements for your town possible.

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Mike McGrath is senior editor and chief information officer for the National Civic League. A former newspaper reporter and magazine writer, he is editor of the quarterly National Civic Review, which will be beginning its centennial year of publishing this spring.

Mike’s posts will appear every Thursday on the State of the Re:Union website.

Entertainment. Most of us think of it in terms of television, smartphones, laptops and iPads. At least this is how many incorporate it into daily living. In fact, it would not take very long to look around and find toddlers, children and adolescents glued to electronic devices. However, the American Academy of Pediatrics’ recent study findings warn that this habit can be detrimental to the development of young children having too much exposure to these devices. To help combat this, State of the Re:Union contributor John McKnight of Abundant Community offers some great and easy ideas on how we can “unplug” and get  back to the origins of entertainment. To read the original text in its entirety, click here.

It may be that most of us are not alarmed by “tube-nurtured” children because we think that what is happening is entertainment — innocent and pleasurable. Therefore, we don’t recognize the fact that the tube is replacing play and genuine entertainment created by children, families and communities. In fact, the word “entertainment” is derived from the Old French which meant “hold together.” Its essence is about relationships between people rather than people and “tubes.”

There is an interesting monograph first printed in 1928 titled “Baraboo 1850’s to 1860’s Pioneer Festivities.” It describes how people entertained themselves in the decade of the 1850’s in the small Wisconsin town of Baraboo. The monograph documents entertainments produced by the residents including (these are just a few in many depictions):

•    Fourth of July celebrations that went on all day and evening.
•    New Year’s day celebrated as a time of gift giving and calling on neighbors and friends.
•    Berrying parties and apple-bees where everyone joined together in forests and orchards.
•    Afternoon tea parties.
•    Public dances of every kind, with local musicians providing the music.
•    Village gatherings to watch the dancing of Native Americans who still lived in the area.
•    Pound parties where everyone attending brought a pound of food to be shared with a poor family.
•    Festivals throughout the community held frequently to raise money for good causes.
•    Park festivities where public gatherings of every kind took place in the village.

This is a history of entertainment, festivity and play that was produced by everyday people in so many ways that most days had at least one entertainment. People knew how to create activities that would be fun, inspiring, social and informative. In that sense they were capable of creating a community’s enjoyment.

In a “tube-focused” community, many people have lost the capacity to produce an enjoyable life. Instead they are consumers of commercial “entertainment.” And because so many of them have never engaged in creating and participating in entertainment, there’s no need for us to develop our talents. We pay to watch people with talent on a tube. And everyone knows that “tubing” has nothing to do with a festive life. Instead it is a sad retreat from the joy of using our abilities to celebrate each other by coming together in a thousand exciting, happy, supportive, friend-making, talent-displaying ways.

So, supposing your 2012 New Year’s resolutions included personal leadership in creating an enjoyable neighborhood. We can begin by recognizing that we still know how to celebrate weddings, birthdays, graduations and holidays with our relatives. The people of Baraboo in the 1850’s have created a community celebration menu for us to build upon. We can join together with our neighbors to have gardening, tea, quilting and book parties. We can open our houses of worship to all kinds of neighborhood celebrations. We can create opportunities to dance together, sing together, make music together and raise money together. We can join in enjoying the talents of our children and debates of public issues.

In all these ways, we can become a real community where we know everyone by name and experience their unique talents. Best of all, we can become real neighbors celebrating life together rather than living isolated lives in houses where electric tubes create a counterfeit life for us and our families.

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John McKnight is an expert on communities. An Ohio native who currently lives near Chicago, he has spent decades organizing communities and researching them, primarily in the Windy City itself. In the course of his career, he mobilized neighborhoods during the civil rights movement, wrote several books about community development, created a center for urban affairs at Northwestern University, and even taught the current President a thing or two about advocacy. (Yes, it’s true: way back when, a young and eager Barack Obama interned at McKnight’s training program for community organizers in southeast Chicago). If that’s not enough, he recently co-authored a book called “The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods.”

State of the Re:Union will be featuring pieces from John McKnight and Peter Block of Abundant Community every other Monday.

The Vito Marcantonio School in East Harlem, New York

This week’s School Spotlight is highlighting one school in East Harlem, New York, where students and staff, with the help of a City Year corp member, are serious about their commitment to and practice of “whole student” philosophy of learning and living.  In fact, to them, it’s just “Common Sense.” To read the original GOOD.is article in its entirety, click here.

In the recent past, the 330 students of the Vito Marcantionio School decided to participate in the Penny Harvest program — a service learning project run by City Year and the nonprofit Common Cents. City Year corp member Meg Malone was somewhat surprised at the tenacity and desire of these children. Of her students Malone says, “I often tell people that just because my students have a higher risk of dropping out of school, that doesn’t mean they don’t have a desire to be active citizens and make a difference in their community.”

In an effort to create more interest in the Penny Harvest program, some students took it upon themselves to hop on the campaign trail and get their peers more involved. Songs were created and sung over the P.A. system to help generate more awareness about the program; and when one fifth grader decided there were not enough signs providing information on Penny Harvest, she created one she thought would get the job done of getting the information out.

Their enthusiasm for gathering funds to help others in need was quite astounding, especially given that a great many of the students are from a low-income background. This just further proves the students have incredible social awareness by recognizing that others around them are in need of help. It also shows their capacity for becoming even more outstanding humanitarians and civic stewards.

After all of the funds for the program had been collected at the months end, a committee of students was needed to help with the allocating of funds. According to the article, “A team of fourth- through eighth-grade students was selected to be the voice of the student body. Throughout the year, they’ll learn more about various community issues and (with the vision of the student population in mind), they’ll choose an organization to donate the money.” Although this is a large and tedious project these students are taking on, they are up for the challenge.

This Penny Harvest project has brought about some teachable moments for staff and kids, alike. It has prompted them to look at the good others are doing in the country (and world). They are becoming more interested in what civic engagement means and how it enriches the community. They are seeing a change, and realizing, they are heroes for their community.

The biggest lesson they are learning: Students plus “Common Cents” equals great community. Making a change and helping others become more interested in the desire to partake in change need not be laborious, grueling or demanding. Most times it is the smallest ideas that produce impressive results. Have a similar story of teachable moments and making civic engagement fun? We love learning about the good growing in our country, so use the box below to share some of your stories.

Thirty years ago, the main vehicle for citizen participation—other than voting—was the public hearing. Public hearings are well and good, but they often serve as little more than a steam-valve for irate citizens to vent. In fact, the very term “public hearing” is considered by many civic experts to be something of a misnomer.

Dan Kemmis, a former Missoula mayor and speaker of the Montana House of Representatives, said it best in this book, Community and the Politics of Place: “Out of everything that happens at a public hearing, the emoting, the attempts to persuade the decision-maker, the presentation of facts, the one element that is almost totally lacking is anything that might be characterized as public hearing.”

More and more communities are discovering new and betters ways of talking about (and hearing about) public issues. In Portsmouth, New Hampshire, for instance, an all-volunteer organization known as Portsmouth Listens conducts regular “study circles” on important local issues.

The study circles process works this way: The small group, consensus-based discussions of 8-12 people take place over a four-week period, meeting once a week. Then they produced a written report on their findings, which was published in the local paper, the Portsmouth Herald.

Portsmouth Listens began as a one-time effort to mobilize parents and students to deal with issues of bullying and violence in schools. Local attorney Jim Noucas and a group of citizens contacted the Study Circles Resource Center (now known as Everyday Democracy) to help put together a dialogue on the subject. More than 12 years later, the city is still using study circles for local dialogues, most recently, an extensive dialogue and report on the city’s budget challenges.

It was Portsmouth city manager John Bohenko’s idea to use the study circles process to review the city’s master plan, the document that guides policy on such issues as development, open space protection, affordable housing, transportation and infrastructure needs.

The master plan involved over 400 citizens over a period of two years. The process led to the development of a visioning statement and set of recommendations adopted by city government.

Portsmouth Listens has also held candidate forums using a dialogue-based roundtable to allow meaningful interaction between voters and candidates.

Portsmouth has a nine-member council with an average of 18 candidates running every two years. So the roundtables were divided into five groups of two or three and the voters into groups of 12-15. Each voter group was given 15 minutes to engage in a roundtable with the candidate groups. Each candidate was given three written questions and their answers are printed in the Herald. The questions were formulated by city officials, former council members and school board members.

Portsmouth Listens co-chair Jim Noucas says study circles have changed how the local government does business. The city is much more likely to consult the public on issues before evaluating the solutions, and the public is much more likely to support solutions that have been developed through deliberation. “It’s not just showing up and giving your opinion,” he says. “You have to be able to work with others, and people walk away with their opinions changed.”

The group is now working to organize a “New Hampshire Listens” to foster dialogue and deliberation on statewide issues and to get more communities in the state to conduct their own local study circles.

You can link here to read a longer article on Portsmouth Listens on the Everyday Democracy website.

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Mike McGrath is senior editor and chief information officer for the National Civic League. A former newspaper reporter and magazine writer, he is editor of the quarterly National Civic Review, which will be beginning its centennial year of publishing this spring.

Mike’s posts will appear every Thursday on the State of the Re:Union website.

Bayard Rustin

On this day of remembering the birth of a man who beget the Civil Rights’ Movement, State of the Re:Union would like to honor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the man who helped his “I Have a Dream” speech come to fruition.

It was Bayard Rustin who urged Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to use a peaceful and non-violent approach when disseminating messages of equality and freedom. That was what made the world-renowned speech so impactful — it made the rest of the United States take note. Today, we celebrate the day that freedom for all began its ascent into the culture of America, and just as the great Doctor King, Jr., we revere the notion of peace and recognize it as a necessity in overcoming adversity.

To find out more on the relationship between Bayard Rustin, MLK, and the Civil Right’s Movement, listen on the player below or click here to visit our episode page and find out how one man’s beliefs unfolded into freedom for all.

Bayard Rustin Episode

Our episode, originally produced in 2010, spans from early in life when he counseled MLK, Jr. on the non-violent resistance that would shape his movement to late in life when Rustin falls in love and champions a new cause.

When you have listened to your hearts content, use the box to tell us what this celebration means for you.