Chapter 13 - Planning tomorrow's schools

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Planning tomorrow's schools	449

  John Eliot School involves the whole community. How does it do it? Says Kronish in her simple, direct, enthusiastic way: "Fully. For instance, the school has recently put on a 90-minute presentation on famous black Americans. A teacher played the role of a cable television interviewer, and students played the roles of famous people. All parents were invited. And they were amazed, thrilled, astounded, proud. Not only did the students learn history, the parents did, too. The parents also help in many other ways. We're not a rich community - far from it. But parents devote talents and time, coming into school on their days off, just being a vital part of the school, because you can't have a good school without an involved community."
  The future of education in America? "Wow!" says Kronish. "If we had the power - and we do - number one would probably be teacher training. It's not enough to only read of these new techniques. You have to be trained in them, in the same way an actor or a poet is trained. Then you can transfer it to others. So we need to encourage all our universities and colleges to introduce the principles of integrative accelerative learning. It's the wave of the future.
  "American education also needs to pay much more attention to research and development. Use the breakthroughs that have already been achieved.
  "Next, we need much more collaboration between classroom teachers and specialists - to break down the barriers. And the whole community needs to be involved: parents, businesses, everyone."
  And how have teachers reacted? Miriam Kronish practices what she enthuses. The phone is instantly handed to fourth-grade teacher Rosemary Greene: "I've been a teacher for 20 years, and I genuinely feel reborn. And the students: they've become 'invested', excited, involved."8 The results, of course, speak for themselves.* In part you'll

*In the first edition of this book, co-author Vos nominated John Elliot school as the best in America, and Kronish as the best principal. Obviously others now agree. In 1995 she won both the Massachusetts state award and the national award for Outstanding Elementary Principal, the latter granted by the United States Department of Education and the National Association of Elementary School Principals. Since then she's won two additional awards: the Golden Foundation Award which honours excellence in education, and the 1996 Educator of the Year Award from the Boston University international honor society called Pi Lambda Theta. Since that first edition, John Eliot School has been visited by hundreds of teachers from round the world.

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