Our school’s mission statement: The Hampden Charter School of Science is a top-ranking tuition-free college preparatory school founded in 2009. The mission of the HCSS is to provide a college preparatory-focused education to the youth of every race and ethnic group in Western Massachusetts in a safe, academically challenging, and caring educational environment. Our core values are respect, responsibility, resilience, …
What is Project Based Learning? Project Based Learning: Explained. “Project Based Learning is a systematic teaching method that engages students in learning knowledge and skills through an extended inquiry process structured around complex, authentic questions and carefully designed products and tasks.” (Markham, Larmer, and Ravitz (2003)) At HCSS, Project Based Learning is an approach we take to instruction that engages …
In his book FOCUS, Mike Schmoker argues that focusing on what is essential (instead of continuing to adopt new methods for school improvement) will decrease the achievement gap. He argues that there are three “essential” areas to improve in schools: What is essential? What we teach -coherent curriculum How we teach – structured lessons Authentic literacy – purposeful reading and …
Lesson Plan Samples: Through my research on Art Education, I have become a strong proponent of incorporating the arts into the classroom, and have tried to do so whenever possible in my History classes. This post will include several examples of how I incorporated art in my classroom over the last decade, in varying topics and grade levels. Sample 1: …
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Research and Literature Review Discipline-Based Art Education (DBAE) is a theory that developed out of the 1960’s when educators and writers began to see art education as its own distinct discipline (Smith, 1987; Logan, 1963). DBAE became an educational movement in the 1980’s as educators began to view art history as an actual inquiry-based process (Chanda, 2007). “The idea of …
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The history of art has always been a topic that has fascinated me as a historian. Art is one of the world’s most ancient tools of communication and it is a form in which we as humans can learn a lot about other cultures, as well as aid in forming our own identities. As a Social Studies teacher, I am …
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