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interest based education--off topic!

updated mon 26 jan 04

 

Dave Finkelnburg on sat 24 jan 04


Becky,
For an answer to your question I asked a teacher in a Minnesota, USA
charter school. Here are his comments: "Charter schools in Minnesota have
to follow the same academic guidelines
and testing as all other public schools. Minnesota has a Reading,
Writing and Math Basic Standards test which we have to test our students
on. They have also put in place in Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments
which we also have to give to our students.
"The big difference in project based education is that the students work
on projects to cover the grad standards rather than attend sit-down,
lecture type classes. Most of the projects are student initiated with
the advisor guiding them to make sure they are covering some standards
with each project they work on. Most projects are multi-disciplinary so
they can work on more that one grad standard with an individual project.
"Some websites that may be of help are:
www.edvisions.coop This is our parent group. EdVisions help set up
project based charter schools throughout Minnesota and Wisconsin and
Gates Edvisions has now gone national.
www.mncharterschools.org This is the Minnesota Association of Charter
Schools, which will give information on all charter schools. Not all
charter schools are projects based, but all of the EdVisions schools
are."
I hope this helps.
Dave Finkelnburg

----- Original Message -----
From: "becky"
Sent: Tuesday, January 20, 2004 2:14 PM
> Dave this is a very interesting idea in education. With no kids in
> the system I really don't feel that I should be overly concerned, but
> at the same time civiliaztion is only as stable as the quality of
> education we give to our kids. How does this form of intrest based
> education work as far as testing programs go? I'm constantly reading
> about the No Child Left Behind laws and tests that are plaguing
> schools, and so I'm wondering how the system you speak of can test.