PILOT PROJECTS 2007

Bartholomew’s World

Rega Wood, Research Professor of Philosophy
Hester Gelber, Professor and Chair, Department of Religious Studies

An innovative approach to teaching Latin and medieval science or natural philosophy using primary sources.  Based on texts from the writings of great Western scholastics, such as Thomas Aquinas and Roger Bacon, and some of their most influential Islamic predecessors, BW was initially developed with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. A resource for exploring the medieval world, BW taps into the popular interest in literature based on medieval myths about wizards (Harry Potter) and dwarfs (Lord of the Rings). BW introduces young people to the Western intellectual tradition and, at the same time, strengthens their skills in Latin and
English. BW offers real improvement in K-12 education by presenting teaching materials designed jointly by the foremost scholarly experts in the field and a group of experienced teachers.

Ecology:  Learning by Doing and Making a Difference

Rodolfo Dirzo, Professor of Biological Sciences
Cindy Wilber, Education Coordinator, Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve

Science education is central for the prosperity of society. Recent assessments of science education in the US offer evidence documenting poor student performance and a chronic ethnic disparity among students pursuing higher education. At the same time, environmental problems are being increasingly magnified locally and globally due to anthropogenic impact. Also, pedagogical improvements are needed to make science education (ecology) an attractive, rewarding and fulfilling option for K-12 students and teachers. Higher education institutions can play an important role in training the new generation of ecologists and science educators in ecology. We will address these concerns by engaging Stanford faculty and students, together with teachers and students of the Redwood High School (RHS) in a pilot experience of learning the science of ecology through an active hands-on research experience, teaching with networks of RHS faculty and Stanford students and faculty and the use of technology in ecology - digital pens and software, field and lab technical equipment.  Communication will be facilitated through co-teaching, writing, and public lectures by Stanford faculty with attendance of RHS community/families, on local and global environmental problems, including problems of their lands of origin, Mexico/Central America); and internationalization, by connecting RHS students and Mexican students engaged in a comparable riparian ecosystem restoration project, via internet, SKYPE calls, and You Tube movies. Our ultimate aspiration is to engage RHS students/teachers/families, in appreciating the fascination, complexity and societal value of ecology as a scientific discipline and to get Stanford involved in local outreach and K-12 education.

Promoting Data-driven, Evidence-based Practices that help to Attract, Develop, and Retain High Quality Teachers in Urban School Districts

Linda Darling-Hammond, Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education and Co-Director, School Redesign Network
Susanna Loeb, Associate Professor of Education and Director of the Institute for Research on Education Policy and Practice

This project would engage urban school leaders and university-based researchers in a collaboration to explore solutions to two inter-related problems in American public education:  (1) how to develop district capacity to collect, assess and use data for continuous improvement along a number of education management and practice domains; and (2) how to bring such evidence-based practices to bear on the need to attract, develop, and retain well-qualified teachers in urban schools. The project will support the use of data within school districts for informing decision-making, and for the development of effective policies and practices in the area of human resources.  As an initial step, project leaders will convene institutional researchers and leaders from school districts in California, Texas, Indiana, New Mexico, Tennessee, Colorado, Florida and Wisconsin, that have already demonstrated an interested in data-driven reform though their participation in the SRN-LEADS (School Redesign Network - Leadership for Accountability in Districts and Schools) network.

Taking Design Thinking to School:  Approaches to Integrating the Design Process in K-12 Teaching and Learning

Shelley Goldman, Professor (Teaching) of Education
Bernie Roth, Professor of Mechanical Engineering – Hasso Plattner Institute of Design

The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design and the School of Education will partner together to explore how design thinking and design processes can best impact teaching and learning in K-12.
In this project we will to take the design process the Institute of Design has developed for teaching graduate students and explore how it can best be used in elementary and middle schools. Building on an initial project at the Nueva School, pilot funds will be used to bring the approach and curriculum to the East Palo Alto Academy Elementary School and to study the impact of the methods on children at both schools. The goal is to understand how design processes help students learn, to discover what content areas are best suited for design projects, and to develop tools to bring what is now a custom curriculum development process to a wide range of schools, particularly those teaching underserved students. The organization of the project strengthens an emergent collaboration between the Institute of Design and the School of Education, provides opportunities for graduate students to work in K-12, and builds capacity at both pilot schools.

Innovations in Literacy Tutoring

Connie Juel, Professor of Education
Paula England, Professor of Sociology

Educators and policy makers of all ideological stripes recognize the disparity in reading level by social class and race/ethnicity as a serious national problem. Learning to read is foundational to all subjects in K-12; problems in reading have grave implications for finishing high school, college attendance, earnings, and intergenerational poverty.  Past research has led to the consensus that the gold standard of literacy intervention is tutoring. We will conduct, expand, and evaluate a reading tutoring program in two schools in East Palo Alto, Costaño Elementary School and the Stanford-sponsored charter school, East Palo Alto Academy. Tutors are Stanford undergraduates.  In conjunction with teaching a Haas Service Learning course involving tutoring, The challenge is to:  1) improve the program further, 2) evaluate its effectiveness using statistical comparison of the learning of children randomly assigned to treatment and control groups, and a qualitative process-oriented coding of videos of tutoring sessions so components can be correlated with student progress, 3) enhance the learning experience of Stanford students taking the service learning course by adding a component in the course focusing on how social class and race inequality in the larger society adversely impact young learners in communities such East Palo Alto, and  4) bring Ravenswood Reads to scale as a model available to other groups, by creating a website with training materials including video clips of best practices, a training manual, and information on how to set up a tutoring program.

Ravenswood Writing Centers

Arnetha F. Ball, Professor of Education
Andrea Lunsford, Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor of English
Clyde Moneyhun, Director, George and Leslie Hume Writing Center
John Tinker, Lecturer, Program in Writing and Rhetoric

The Ravenswood Writing Centers Project is a collaborative endeavor among Stanford’s School of Education, Department of English, Program in Writing and Rhetoric, and Hume Writing Center, as well as three public schools in the Stanford area.  This collaborative was formed to address the current writing crisis that exists in our nation’s K-12 schools, particularly among students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds who are economically challenged and are receiving instruction from teachers who feel under prepared to teach writing to their students. The Ravenswood Writing Centers Project aims to enhance the writing and communication skills and the leadership abilities of culturally and linguistically diverse high school students and to offer high school faculty professional curricular training in Writing Across the Curriculum through the creation and ongoing support of writing centers at Stanford’s East Palo Alto High School, Summit Preparatory Charter High School, Hillsdale Comprehensive High School and eventually to a growing number of other schools in the surrounding area.  Rather than simply offering tutorial support for high school students, we envision preparing those students to become tutors themselves and to become leaders in developing and sustaining a strong culture of writing in their schools and communities. Thus our goal is to serve as a model for what others—at the local, national, and international level—can do to train high school and university undergraduate students as tutors who may become our nation’s future teachers, to provide professional development and support for practicing classroom teachers who have not received the training they need to teach writing to the diverse students in their classrooms, and to offer greater opportunities for the many K-12 students attending urban schools who are not achieving to their fullest potential.

Teaching Historical Thinking:  Teacher Preparation and Curricular Intervention

Sam Wineburg, Professor of Education and by courtesy, History

We are in the midst of an adolescent literacy crisis. Increasingly, students arrive in the middle and high school classroom able to decode and understand simple text, but unable to learn from the more complex textbooks and materials in their content classrooms.   The social studies curriculum is an obvious site for reading and writing instruction.  However, few social studies teachers have training in discipline-specific reading instruction. The Stanford Teacher Education Program (STEP) Curriculum and Instruction approach to history/social studies brings discipline-specific literacy instruction into the social studies classroom. Over the past six years, we have fine-tuned our approach, developing a methods course that draws from the latest research on cognition, learning and reading comprehension.  We have also developed numerous curricular materials that feature our approach to historical reading.  For this pilot, we propose to train teachers in a two-week summer session to implement a four-month literacy-based history curriculum beginning in Fall 2008. We will select two schools for the curricular intervention and measure learning effects through a matched-control design. We will administer pre- and post-test measures to capture student attitudes about history, conceptions of the past, reading comprehension, and disciplinary reading strategies.

Youth Participatory Media Culture: Evolving online journalism and broadcast journalism to develop media literacies and engage broader student communities

Roy Pea, Professor of Education
Brigid Barron, Associate Professor of Education
Ted Glasser, Professor, Department of Communications

We will develop new partnership on the emerging educational issues of new media literacies and youth participatory media culture between Stanford faculty and students from the School of Education, the Communication Department, and Stanford’s Center for Innovation in Learning (SCIL)—and Palo Alto High School’s nationally recognized and award-winning online news and broadcast journalism programs and teacher team. Stanford will bring to this partnership Stanford’s DIVER software, a web-based application allowing users to employ their web browser to upload and view digital video clips and add text annotations to specific points in space and time within the videos as a form of persistent “video footnoting” for the discourse topics of video conversations. DIVER allows lightweight web-video editing in that users can simply create remixes of annotated video segments for sharing with others through email notifications or websites. We will work with Palo Alto High teachers and students to design, develop and implement productive pedagogical models for integrating Stanford’s DIVER technology into: (1) critical media literacy curriculum activities, and (2) for fostering web-based video conversations among learning community participants in the context of high school online journalism and participatory media cultural contributions from the broader school audience to the school news. Evaluation activities will include surveys, interviews and case studies among learners, with scale-up opportunities in subsequent phases of the project including the MacArthur Foundation Digital Learning and Media Initiative, the Technology Initiative of the National Writing Project, and extension of the partnerships to a broader network incorporating more diverse schools in the Bay Area and beyond.