Chapter 15 - Just do it!

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Just do it!	493

  Its next project is a "Knowledge Port: a school without walls, where we try to integrate seventh, eighth and ninth grade with high school, and actually move the children around to workplaces, study halls, language institutes, gyms etc. for a more reality-based education". The foundation is also working "on a community-based media center open to everyone. The idea is that it will be the core that connects all the schools and families in the community." Helena Wallenberg is now pressing for companies to get tax-credits for investing in "enterprise zones" that will be built around lifelong learning centers.
  In the city of Lund, in the south of Sweden are 38 relatively new preschool centers and three combined early-childhood and elementary schools operated by a group known as Pysslingen. The project is administered by private enterprise, working with local authorities, aimed at providing high-quality "educare". "The goal," says leader Monica Lundberg, "has been to combine the best from the public sector - fair distribution - with the best from private enterprise: efficiency." 3
  Monica Lundberg says the business-school model has proved so effective that many local governments - which are in charge of Swedish schooling - now turn to Pysslingen to run their government programs. Pysslingen is also setting up an integrated combined early-childhood-elementary school center for disabled children, combining accelerated learning methods with new methods for physical training.

The certification model
 
  Sweden is also showing the way in training teachers in a combination of the best methods outlined in this book, so they can become certified "learning revolution" practitioners.
  More than 25,000 Swedish teachers have so far been trained by co-author Vos. Most started off at short workshops, but many have followed-up with one-week courses. From Gullivare schools, in Sweden's Arctic Circle, for example, 45 teachers attended Jeannette Vos's Module One certification program in 1997. Fifteen of them came to Module Two, on group dynamics, and Module Three, on curriculum design.
  In 1998 they have taken two final modules on advanced techniques. And those qualifying go on to train other teachers in the same methods. Jeannette's Learning Revolution Academy is now running similar modules each year in San Diego, California, as well as Sweden.

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