Building School Community
The building of a supportive and inclusive classroom and school is essential to fostering personalized learning and the design of rigorous and relevant curriculum. Eagle Rock School is a small, year round, full scholarship, residential, value driven school that welcomes students who have not previously experiences school success. Eagle Rock has worked to intentionally build a safe and healthy school culture that we believe forms the foundation for our students’ success. Often schools building such a community can face many challenges in light of school and classroom demands. This panel will field questions about building such a community with responses from Eagle Rock School Head Robert Burkhardt, Director of Students Philbert Smith, Director of Professional Development Michael Soguero, Associate Director of the Professional Development Center Dan Condon and 2 current students of Eagle Rock School.
| SUBMITTED QUESTIONS |
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Hi Eagle Rock! I am the principal of a small alternative school in Portland, OR. I'd like to know what you believe are the key elements of building a strong school community. What school practices do you see as essential?
Jamie
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Hello,
I attended the Fitness and Physiology Summit at Eagle Rock Professional Development Center this past summer. I am a founding staff member of Kurt Hahn Expeditionary Learning School in East Flatbush, Brooklyn and we have borrowed a couple of your ideas for our community meeting which meets once a week on Fridays. I am charged with writing the "rationale/description" of our community meetings and would love to see anything that you all have come up with in regards to your thinking behind your community meetings.
By the way-- Robert Burkhardt's twin brother Ross was my 8th grade teacher-- the best school year I ever had. And I saw one of your current students that I met out there in Colorado working at my local farmer's market in Brooklyn--small, connected world.
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Hello everyone at Eagle Rock! Many schools focus on building a school community at the start of the school year. For instance, schools often take one or two weeks at the beginning of the year to run building community activities and then maybe schools revisit such activities at the beginning of each semester. Yet in order to build a really strong community it seems that such activities and philosophies must be engrained into the everyday practices of the school. What are some ways that Eagle Rock continually builds a school community over the course of the entire year?
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Eagle Rock has 96 students, most high schools have 400, 800, 1800, or more. Of your community and trust building work, what specific work do you do that you believe, or better yet, have experienced, to be scalable to a large school? Any suggestions on how to scale or modify the work in a different context?
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I am a Co-Director and Co-Founder of June Jordan School for Equity in San Francisco. One of our school-wide goals this year is to "institutionalize messaging and rituals that create a paradigm shift in behavior, school pride and future-focused academic engagement." What kind of advice could you give us around messaging and rituals that truly creates a paradigm shift for our students? What are our tools as leaders to transform our communities into positive and equity focused learning environments?
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One of the main barriers to building positivie school culture at my school is conflict among students. These conflicts are often dealt with in the same way they're dealt with in the students' communities--through verbal altercations or physical fights. While we don't have many physical fights at the school compared to other comprehensive high schools in the city, there are a lot of situations where students (often our young women) get into destructive verbal conflicts in public places, like the halls or classrooms. What would you suggest as ways of healing after these incidents for the students involved and for the rest of the community? Of course we're striving to help our students resolve their conflicts peacefully (which is one of our Community Values) through peer mediation, but it is a challenge when we're also not trying to weed out students who come from neighborhoods where it is the norm to use violence to settle conflicts.
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