SLA

After living four years in Costa Rica I got used to a dish named gallo pinto consisting primarily of rice, beans and eggs. It is easy to make, nutritious, and most importantly somehow better than any of the stand alone ingredients. As I was making it the other night for dinner it occurred to me that during SLA’s first year we hit upon a curriculum structure that, much like gallo pinto, that turned out to be greater than the some of its parts.

When I was in graduate school I was told about the “factory model of education” in a tone of such derision that it is only used these days among my circle of friends for the current occupants of the White House. Today it seems to me that as a society we are moving inextricably in the direction where schools are factories, administrators are managers, teachers are line workers, and students are merely units of production.

This piece was originally posted in a faculty forum in response to Chris's question of what we learned in our first year at SLA and what we would like to tell our new faculty members. I had come to SLA from teaching in progressive private schools and found the transition difficult at first.

My first year at SLA was both humbling and a tremendous learning experience. One of the things that I learned this year in my one to one classroom is that the technology helps to facilitate a more democratic learning environment.