Impact from the Middle

  Lately, our iDL team, and I'd wager to say our student designers as well, have been having a lot of fun. Having fun, whether professionally or personally, is SOOO important and infectious. One of the keys to having fun is having a good team to work alongside. Our iDL team is fortunate to have become not only a team, but a team of friends. C.S. Lewis explored the friend-bond, known in Greek as philia , in his writings entitled "The Four Loves:" “Friendship arises out of mere Companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden). The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, "What? You too? I thought I was the only one." As a team collaborating to build and fly this airplane known as Impact Design Lab this year, we have already had a lot of fun, and I think t...

So there’s this iceberg. It has floated in and out of my teaching life at Mount Vernon - most recently as an operative metaphor for an identities unit in 7th grade humanities... Who am I? What’s the story behind my story? On one level, I think it does serve as a helpful visual by which we might explore ourselves and our stories. The iceberg might help us ponder how much of ourselves we’re ever really able to show and share with the world. (As I write this, I hope I haven’t imparted the message that we, like this iceberg, are destined to float alone, bobbing over waters vast and serene and empty… The aforementioned iceberg. Today, this iceberg represents what my students have helped me begin to see and understand about their experience of school. Especially...around our early prototypes of competency-based education. Our school uses a learning platform called Altitude Learning. The student-facing experience of Altitude centers upon “cards” - that is, the discrete learning tasks each tea...