As part of the campaign for school board, various constituencies ask candidates to address their concerns. Here is my response to the TAG community.
Dear TAG Community,
My name is Gary Appel and I currently serve on the TCAPS Board of Education and the board's curriculum, policy and communications committees.
I have been a full-time educator promoting innovative approaches to learning and creating award winning programs for over 34 years. As a young science teacher in California in 1979, I co-developed the very first program in the country to use school gardens as a living laboratory for the study of science by elementary students. See 1986 NY Times article on my work: http://www.nytimes.com/1986/11/13/garden/schools-add-green-thumb-to-science.html?scp=1&sq=Appel%20school%20gardens%20Life%20Lab&st=cse
More recently, I was part of a small group of American educators nationally who adapted a Japanese approach to teacher professional development, called Lesson Study, to the culture of US education. Later, I co-authored a book on the process called Leading Lesson Study, designed to help US teachers implement Lesson Study. http://www.corwinpress.com/booksProdDesc.navprodId=Book228390&#tabview=reviews
I believe TAG, AT, and AP are effective programs and central to TCAPS identity as a full service school district. I am committed to maintaining and growing those quality programs.
Every single student counts and our role as a district is to offer educationally sound programs that respect the diversity of needs represented by our students and their families. Struggling learners, high achievers, the gifted and everybody in between deserve to be served and challenged.
In the new competitive marketplace of schooling, parents rightly want choices. As resources allow, I want to see us explore creating magnet elementary schools (e.g. science, language immersion, etc.) and more specialized programs within schools such as Sci-Ma-Tech (where my son, Micah is a student).
Bend, Oregon, with 17,000 students has four very popular and academically strong magnet schools. We can learn from them. Also, board members Megan Crandall, Marjie Rich and I are intrigued by the International Baccalaureate (IB) program, a very demanding approach to high school now used in schools around the globe. We need to be relentless in our pursuit of ideas that work.
I would like us to transform the junior and senior years of high school (for those interested and capable) and include capstone projects, for-profit and non-profit organization internships and high level service learning opportunities, all requiring application of knowledge to the real world.
Schools for too long have mostly treated students as simple knowledge consumers. With our current and future programs, we need to also see students as knowledge generators.
As a Board of Education member, I need your help to continuously improve the quality and depth of our services to high achieving and gifted students. We need to search the world for great ideas and adapt the best of those ideas for TCAPS. If we get it right, we can begin to reverse the long term decline in our enrollment and rebuild the district.
Please take the chance to visit my web site http://www.appelforschoolboard.org/ and my education blog http://www.appelcoreideas.blogspot.com/ to learn more.
Contact me at gappel@ncrel.org or 223.9272 with your thoughts and questions. I would be happy to gather with TAG parents interested in sharing their views and probing mine.
Sincerely,
Gary Appel
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I applaud your intent to continue to offer current programming and explore new ways of providing opportunities to our students, but with all the changes happening at the secondary level, we also have to take into account the effect of mass change happening all at once.
ReplyDeleteIn the last very few years, we have changed our curriculum, changed the amount of time we have to deliver the curriculum, and intend to implement an advisory system that is guaranteed to take even more time away from instruction.
At the same time, we face an immense budget crisis and teachers appear to be first on the chopping block, from increasing class sizes to reducing staff and programming, as per your previous post. We want to offer the finest education to our students, but our front-line is threatened most by these cuts.
It would be great to have these magnet schools and an IB program for our students. It would also be great to have the district show a commitment to those who would be responsible for implementing these programs, namely, the teachers.
Forgive me for posting anonymously. I am a TCAPS teacher, and don't feel comfortable providing my name.