Klingenstein Summer Institute

So I'm in New Jersey working. Yes, working. In fact, working very hard. But loving every minute of it. I am in Lawrenceville, NJ, 5 miles from Princeton, 45 minutes from Philly, and an 1 and 1/2 hours from NYC. I am staying at The Lawrenceville School (http://www.lawrenceville.org/), an independent co-ed boarding school for 9-12 grade. It is a beautiful place, steeped in history and reminds me of our small alma mater in its size - meaning its BIG for a high school! It has green lawns speckled with clover and a library that is to be envied by anyone. Let's not even talk about the Science Building, I get choked up.

Anyway, I have been doing a lot of listening, reading, writing, reflecting, thinking, analyzing, planning and sharing. As someone told me today at dinner, it's kind of like "teacher camp." The cool part about it is we are all relatively new teachers (teaching 1-5 years) and we are mostly like-minded in that we aren't jaded, are optimistic about education, and are excited to take all this knowledge back to our schools.

We have two main groups, our curriculum group (Science for me) and a Diversity Group, made up of members of every curriculum group. I try each night to reflect on the days events because believe me, it all muddles together a bit. So here goes. (Sorry if it is so short, and not much reflection, usually there is, but my brain capacity is getting limited)

This morning I got up at 6:30 to get to breakfast by 7:15.
Breakfast from 7:15-8:00
Morning Meeting at 8:00
8:30-10:30 Lecture about Designing lessons. We talked about misconceptions in learning and watched a video calld "Minds of Our Own" (great video!)
10:30-11:00 Break
11:00-12:00 Curriculum Groups - we evaluated our comments by looking at praise and feedback from yesterday's discussion
12:00-1:00 Lunch
1:00-3:00 Curriculum Groups - we learned about Inquiry based learning and its applications in our curriculum. We asked what it means to have Inquiry, How this looks in a classroom, what students look like that are doing inquiry and how we can assess what the student knows.
3:00-5:30 Finished my homework reading for tonight on Diversity and White Privilege
5:30-6:00 Checked my email
6:00-7:00 Dinner
7:00-8:30 Diversity Groups. We discussed the articles and talked about white privilege we see in our schools, in ourselves and how this relates to learning and educating all students. We asked whether we should sacrifice and if so, what because of this privilege afforded us. We talked about how to educate all of our students about the power structure in society and how we have to be able to talk and open to discuss our own place in this structure.
9:00 Called my parents
9:05-10:15 Read 3 articles for the Diversity session tomorrow on sexual orientation in schools
10:15-10:20 surfed the internet, began writin this blog
10:20-10:45 Talked to parents

Finishing this blog. Going to bed. It all starts again at 7:15 tomorrow.