Though Moran’s experience as a student was continual success, and Socol struggled through school as a special needs student, both came to understand that the system design of the American school fails far too many children, and that real change, real reform, requires both new paradigms of leadership and new understandings of the process of learning. The inside-out and outside-in perspectives brought by all three educators was unified through interactive storytelling, co-facilitated conversations which lead to direct and immediate change actions which begin to shift schools, the classrooms in those schools, and the libraries/learning commons at the center of those schools, from traditional environments to contemporary learning spaces.Nonfiction Book signings by several authors of note topped of the program. In the above picture are authors Steve Sheinkin, Bomb (MacMillan Press) and Sally Walker, Written in Bone (Carolrhoda/Lerner). I was able to bring back 24 free hardcover books for our collection! The success in this conference can be measured by the inspiration it gave me to see Crittenden turn into one of those leading and innovative tales to be shared with educators motivationally around the country, as per this 1917 quote from noted educator Angelo Patri (A Schoolmaster of the Great City), ” What the school system needs to understand is that its strength lies, not in the strength of the central organization, but in the strength of the individual school, not in making one school like another, but in making each school a distinct unit. The need of the system is the preservation of its units, so that each school can keep itself alive, wide awake, responsive to its people, easily adaptable, the best of its kind.”
October 28, 2012
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