Coalition of Essential Schools National

Description

We believe that the CES Common Principles - emphasizing equity, personalization, and intellectual vibrancy - serve as a guide to creating schools that will nurture students to reach their fullest potential. We believe that to change the public school system, we need to create and sustain large numbers of individual schools that fully enact CES principles - schools that can serve as models to other schools and demonstrations to the public that it is possible to re-imagine education. In addition to the individual schools, we also need to create the conditions under which whole systems of schools will become equitable, personalized, and intellectually vibrant. To affect these whole systems, we seek to support regional centers to develop the capacity to aid schools and to influence school districts and states. And we seek to influence wider public opinion and policy-makers to create policy conditions conducive to the creation and sustenance of schools that enact CES principles. With a substantial three year grant from the Annenberg Foundation CES is launching the CES Principles Video Project. We are capturing, via video, moments in which teachers from CES Mentor Schools bring CES Principles to life. We will make these clips accessible in a variety of media - packaged, indexed and  layered in ways that will make the most of their potential as professional development tools for teachers. We are contracting with the Science Media Group at the Harvard-Smithsonian Institute for Astrophysics to create the videos and handle the technical aspects of DVD and Web production. We will capture several different clips of exemplary practice from across the disciplines for each of our principles and professional development materials will be developed to accompany the videos. Beyond the clips themselves, however, we plan to take advantage of a Web and DVD-based environment in helping viewers makes meaning of the clips.