Imagine you have an idea. Something you’re passionate about or some solution you think will help people deal with a problem. The next step is to figure out how you’re going to implement it. And that can be daunting…

Check out Portfolio co-founder, Doug Schachtel, on the “Learning Unboxed” Podcast.

Understanding the differences between traditional, progressive and project-based curriculums may help in navigating an unknown future.

Listen to a podcast featuring Portfolio co-founder, Babur Habib…Everyone deserves the best possible education, yet our current traditional one-size-fits-all educational model born during the industrial age is not meeting the needs of our new, rapidly evolving knowledge-based economy. The next generation deserves a personalized educational experience that better equips them with the skills, values, and knowledge they need to thrive in a new modern world. We got to chat with two leaders pushing to revolutionize education, Orly Friedman, co-founder of the Red Bridge School, and Babur Habib, co-founder of the Portfolio School. Both share priceless insight and stories that highlight the challenges of helping children better prepare for a new modern world.

I want to take you through the steps of a fun, woodworking project: the making of a simple wooden wall sconce. This is a lamp that hangs on the wall and provides soft, diffuse light from behind a sculptural shade. The shade is built from a wooden frame with translucent fabric or heavy paper stretched over the center. These lamps can be abstract or representational. Depending on the wattage of the bulb they can be a serious source of light or a nightlight.

…my great-grandfather and my grandfather were both optical scientists, so there is a tradition in my family of being able to make anything.  My grandfather worked for Kodak, and he invented one of the first pacemakers. He and I spent many afternoons building things together!

I am very excited to welcome Susanna Block as our Curriculum Development/Implementation Specialist for next year! Susanna is an exceptionally thoughtful and student-centered educator, who brings more than a decade of experience as a teacher and administrator to this role. She has served as both a teacher and leader, and has led efforts to shape curriculum at both the lower and middle school levels.

Through Project ScaleUp teachers will be able to search for project “maps” according to different topics and grade levels, and even modify them for their students. The library of quality project maps will thus grow as each new customized project (which has been successfully implemented) is uploaded to the platform.

I’m thrilled to introduce the Portfolio Community to another talented educator joining our team in the Fall, Katie Cheek.  Her expertise, deep commitment to project-based learning and teaching, and student-centric approach are abundantly clear and impressed us in her hiring process.  She is also warm, highly creative, and has a great sense of humor.

We are very excited to welcome Molly Brown as our new Lower School teacher!  Molly inspired and impressed us during her candidate visit to Portfolio with her warmth, expertise, and the connections that she made with our students.  Her demo lesson engaged our students in a hands-on, inquiry-based activity, and her conversations with us reflected her passion for experiential, maker-centered learning and teaching.

It was great to see how other people are taking on the same challenge of re-inventing K-12. The schools represented in the group have a lot of different approaches and focuses: some are just Middle School, one has an inter-generational element, some are urban, some are suburban, one is designed for home-schoolers...But our similarities far outweigh our differences. And our hope is that in coming together, we can collect our individual voices and form a movement, creating a shared vision and thus enabling a bigger impact.

While the struggle of boys in traditional school models is made clearly evident to parents, that of girls is not nearly so visible.  For one thing, girls are socialized early to meet and exceed expectations of “good behavior”. Girls in traditional schools demonstrate daily the skills they have spent their preschool years mastering:  compliance and competence. Their early expertise in self-regulation (raising one’s hand before speaking, taking turns) comes at the expense of self-confidence, inhibits risk-taking for fear of failure, and undervalues pushing boundaries.   

At schools like HLS and Portfolio School, PBL prepares all students female and male, but I would argue it’s particularly important for girls hardwired to always try their best. PBL prepares girls to succeed in both the classroom and the boardroom by giving them the confidence to take risks and fail and it socializes them to excel in a magnificently imperfect world where confidence matters more than competence.

Every time children create a project they are consciously engaging in constructing a public entity (e.g., an artifact, document, or artistic exploration). This entity represents a piece of the children themselves—their thoughts, their feelings, their adventures, and their learning.