the Responsive Classroom method

Interesting article, similar strategies used at the Bronx Guild like crew- a 50 minute period each day where one teacher and 15 students participate in circle time, writing, field trips and crew guided learning. 

How does SCSD utilize these strategies ? 

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/27/teaching-lessons/

The Responsive Classroom approach centers on several ostensibly mundane classroom practices. Each morning students form a circle, greet one another, share bits of news, engage in a brief, fun activity and review the day’s agenda. The idea is to build trust, ensure a little fun (which adolescents crave) and confront small problems before they become big. Students might welcome one another with salutations from a foreign language. An activity might involve tossing several balls around a circle in rapid succession. Students share weekend plans or explore topics like bullying before lessons begin.

If this sounds obvious or intuitive, it is, but so is being loving and kind. That doesn’t make it easier to achieve. Part of what makes the approach effective is that each routine is highly structured, and so replicable, but allows for student input and choice.

The fun and games have an ulterior purpose. My instructor emphasized how, at the end of each activity, we should bring the exercise back to concrete classroom skills. Tossing a ball, for example, is like the exchange of ideas, requiring students to follow a discussion’s trajectory with their eyes.

Another tenet is that teachers should avoid indiscriminate praise in favor of neutral language that encourages specific behaviors so children can precisely identify and so replicate their triumphs. (The research of Carol S. Dweck, a psychology professor at Stanford, has separately come to similar conclusions.) Finding the best words, however, can be surprisingly difficult after years of crowing, “Great job!” So the course had us devise and rehearse the verbal and nonverbal cues we wanted to use.

In my classroom, the shared routines have already led to a greater sense of calm and purpose, which has led to more productive lessons. I’m not alone in enjoying concrete results from the Responsive Classroom method. In one study, presented in September, researchers looked at 24 schools randomly assigned to training in the Responsive Classroom or to a control group, which did not receive the same teacher training or support. When faithfully implemented, the approach correlated with a substantial rise — a roughly 20-point gain on average — on state standardized test scores in reading and math.

Why does Responsive Classroom work where other approaches do not? Sara E. Rimm-Kaufman, the study’s lead author and an associate professor of education at the University of Virginia, theorizes it’s because teachers not only received intensive training but also had follow-up coaching once they returned to their classrooms, which increased the chances that new practices would take hold. Teachers also praised the program’s pacing: coaches encouraged teachers to adopt steps slowly over a sustained period, instead of trying to transform their classrooms overnight.

“The take-home message,” Dr. Rimm-Kaufman says, “is that interventions that take a long time to learn and that require more resources also produce more change.” The required financial investment isn’t enormous, and the findings suggest that schools and districts would do better to devote limited resources to a few sustained programs, rather than providing scattershot offerings in teacher training.

Schoolwide buy-in also appeared critical to the approach’s success. Where principals and administrators supported the use of the Responsive Classroom method, gains on test scores were greatest. But, if the program was just one of many randomly tossed at teachers, then test scores remained flat or even declined.

In other words, teachers can’t go it alone. They need sustained training and support using empirically tested methods in concert and collaboration with one another. This is how schools succeed.

Liberty Park design ideas

With the high proportionate usage of Liberty Park by adults- especially college aged - it would be a good idea to incorporate some adult physical play features into the redesign.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/01/nyregion/new-york-introduces-its-first-adult-playground.html?pagewanted=print

June 29, 2012

Mom, Dad, This Playground’s for You

By WINNIE HU

IT was a classic father-son moment, reversed: The 2-year-old sat and watched patiently as his parent hung upside down from the monkey bars. A few feet away, a white-haired man skipped across an S-shaped metal beam. Another man squeezed his six-foot frame onto a metal rack for situps, and two others hoisted themselves up chin-up bars.

Never mind the punishing diets, the gym dates and the doctors’ warnings, the quest to live a healthier, more active lifestyle has come to this: playgrounds for adults.

New York City is testing its first such playground in Macombs Dam Park in the Bronx, and plans to bring as many as two dozen more to neighborhoods across the five boroughs in the next 18 months, park officials said.

The goal is to lure people off their couches and into the outdoors with specially designed playground equipment — in grown-up shades like forest green and beige — that recall the joy of childhood play while tightening up flabby abs, thighs and triceps.

Though there are no swings or slides — these are essentially outdoor gyms — such playgrounds not only have the look of traditional children’s play spaces, but they are also built in some cases by the same manufacturers.

The adult playground concept is borrowed from China and parts of Europe, where outdoor fitness areas for adults have become as routine as high-fiber diets or vitamin D supplements in preventive care, particularly for older people.

Now a growing number of city and park officials, health experts and community leaders throughout the country are praising the health and social benefits of adult playgrounds. They say that the playgrounds will succeed where treadmills have failed in combating rising rates of obesity and related illnesses by enticing the grown-ups out for play dates.

“Let’s face it, most of us dread going to the gym,” said Dr. David Ludwig, a Harvard Medical School professor who directs the Obesity Prevention Center at Boston Children’s Hospital. “The point is to make physical activity fun, easy and accessible, so it’s the normal thing to do.”

Adult playgrounds have spread across the nation, including to Miami-Dade County in Florida, where four fitness zones with advanced strength-training equipment opened this year in neighborhoods with high rates of cardiovascular diseases. San Antonio has added outdoor fitness stations to 30 parks since 2010. Los Angeles has 30, with 15 more on the way, after park officials found, to their surprise, there were “lines of people waiting to use the equipment.”

And two mothers in Washington State, Paige Dunn and Kelly Singer, started a grass-roots campaign last year to build “Momentum” sites to help new mothers shed their baby weight; each site would face a children’s play area and hold seven pieces of equipment that specifically target problem areas. The women raised $30,000 to open the first one in Auburn, Wash; a second will be dedicated in Redmond, Wash., next month.

In New York City, where adults are banned from playgrounds unless accompanied by a child, the $200,000 Bronx playground with 15 pieces of equipment opened two years ago as part of an effort to get more people out to the parks to exercise and slim down. Parks officials said it had been popular enough that the city was now planning a rapid expansion.

“This represents a continuing evolution of both parks and playgrounds,” said Adrian Benepe, the parks commissioner.

This fall, the city will build a second adult playground with upgraded amenities — river view, exercise mats, chess tables, a sign that says, “Adult Space” — at John Jay Park on the Upper East Side. Councilwoman Jessica Lappin, who represents the neighborhood, said she had secured $250,000 in city money for the project after some of her older constituents pointed out, “There are tot lots, but there’s no place for us.”

“A lot of these people live alone,” she said. “So going outside to the park, and being part of the activity of the park, is important to them.”

About 150 spots in city parks have one or two pieces of old-fashioned adult fitness equipment, mostly static pieces like chin-up bars. And parks elsewhere have had fitness circuits for years, though usually they’ve been fairly modest. Many of the new adult playgrounds will have comprehensive workout areas and equipment with moving pieces.

As public policy, adult playgrounds have proved far easier to sell as an anti-obesity measure than, say, a proposed ban on large sodas. They produce almost no noise or car traffic, take up little space and are cheaper to build than children’s playgrounds, though the cost varies depending on size and location.

“They’re not controversial,” said Michael Shull, a parks superintendent in Los Angeles, which spends an average of $40,000 on a site for adults, versus $300,000 for children. New York City’s adult playgrounds will cost from $75,000 for the smallest one, with five pieces of equipment, to more than $200,000, park officials said. In contrast, children’s playgrounds typically start at $500,000, with the majority running $1 million to $2 million.

The demand for adult-size equipment has created a niche business in an industry that once catered mainly to the elementary school set. GameTime, one of the largest manufacturers of children’s playground equipment, introduced a new adult line in 2009 called iTrack, which includes elliptical trainers and rowing machines. Outdoor Fitness in Colorado has worked with more than 600 adult sites since 2005, according to Barry King, the founder. In addition to sites in public parks, the equipment is being installed at residential developments and business complexes.

Jim Sargen, a former technology executive who started TriActive America in California, which has supplied 470 adult sites since 2004, half in the past three years, said he discovered firsthand while traveling in Beijing in 2002 that exercise could be passed off as play. “My wife, who doesn’t normally exercise, climbed onto one of the pieces,” he recalled. “She said, ‘It’s kind of fun,’ and an idea clicked.”

The adult playground in the Bronx, the city’s poorest borough and a place dogged by troubling health statistics, is built on top of a parking garage and sandwiched between a track and basketball and handball courts. It has attracted regulars like Brian Ferreira, 20, who once tried working out at a children’s playground near his home in Soundview, only to draw stares from the parents. Now he hops onto two trains and a bus, three times a week, to have a playground of his own. “I use every piece of equipment,” he said. “It’s good endurance training.”

On a recent morning, regulars and newcomers alike drifted onto the playground and waited patiently — no tears or whining here — to use the equipment; one of the most popular was a pair of metal seats that any child would have loved, rising and falling with the push of foot pedals.

The morning hours brought fathers with toddlers, and muscled older men who wore gloves and earphones and effortlessly executed situps, push-ups and pull-ups. They retreated when noisy teenagers passed through bouncing basketballs and running around the equipment without stopping to use any.

In the afternoon, a 30-year-old court clerk swung from the monkey bars during his lunch hour. Others just watched.

“Oh no, I’m past my prime,” said Daren Trapp, a bus driver with a tummy bulge who was among the observers. “It’s out in the open, and I guess I’m a private individual.”

But Colette Prosper, an unemployed mother of five, and her daughter, Iesha, 21, came ready to sweat. It was their third time at the playground in a week; the first time, a stranger had to show them how to use the equipment. Ms. Prosper, 45, who said she was trying to lose 40 pounds, said her clothes were already feeling looser.

“It’s a free membership, and I like what they have to offer,” she said. “I’m getting older, so I’m trying to get everything in shape.”

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2012/05/best-city-parks-systems-america/2052/

The rating system, ParkScore, is based on more than a year's worth of data from cities and parks departments around the country. The scores are a composite of five factors: median park size, acreage as a percent of city area, percent of residents living within a 10-minute walk of a park, park system spending per resident, and the number of playgrounds per 10,000 residents.

"Even if you have a big city or a small city, a dense city or a more spread out city, an older city or a younger city, we feel that those factors all point to a pretty fair way of judging cities against each other," says Peter Harnik, director of the Trust for Public Land's Center for City Park Excellence. He says advanced GIS data enabled a more detailed analysis of spatial information, including pedestrian barriers like train tracks or paths uncrossable without a bridge.

In addition to the rankings, the Trust for Public Land has created a website where the complete data from all the rankings can be seen. Users can also see block-level maps showing the most park-accessible areas in these cities.

No one city performed ideally across all these metrics. Top ranking San Francisco, for example, has a median park size of just 2 acres, while 8th-ranked San Diego has a median size of 6.7 acres. And while Virginia Beach has the highest number of parks per 10,000 residents in this list – 5 – the city ranks 7th.

Harnik notes that a wide variety of factors determine how well a city's parks serve its people. The number of playgrounds may be the most important.

"We feel a playground is really a basic bottom-line measure of what a city park system is doing for its residents. Obviously playgrounds are great for children, but they go way beyond children. They're community gathering areas, they are so important to the social network of a neighborhood and a city," Harnik says. "It's somewhat of a predictor of the other kinds of facilities that a city parks department provides its citizens."

our balkanized, inefficient and anachronistic education system

The best thing about the school property tax cap is that it undermines the integrity of our balkanized, inefficient and anachronistic education system. A system that separates kids based on illogical and superficial political divisions established in an era when horses pulled farmer’s carts home after market, and white men exercised a political and economic monopoly. An educational system that supports an agricultural society not a nano-technological one, because it limits the days devoted to book learning to 180, or 49% of the year. All of these issues, and more, compound to create a very dysfunctional K-12 educational system across this country, and in fact, the problems are so dire that that the Council on Foreign Relations recently concluded that they “constitute a very grave national security threat facing this country”[1]. 

This country needs to modernize our education system by eliminating antiquated structures and ensure that all students, regardless of the wealth of the family that they were born into, have outstanding teachers, campuses and resources. However, across New York State “school districts have overwhelmingly complied with the spirit of the tax cap, unfortunately to the detriment of their educational mission and financial stability,” said NYSASBO Executive Director Michael

J. Borges.[2]

The Schenectady School Board is no exception, and while the Superintendent and the Board stated that the budget overwhelmingly approved by the voters “preserves the full range of instructional programs and services so critical to the success of our students”[3], they are being either disingenuous or dangerously naive about education.

First, the 2012-13 Schenectady School Budget will undercut pre-k education by reducing funds for supplies and eliminating a teacher. Research shows that intensive instruction for pre-k kids generates life long rewards for the student and society, but neglecting early education decreases the nation’s economic productivity and limits possibilities for children. The need is vast for rigorous early education. For example, one study that found that the vocabularies of kids from low-income families were 50% smaller than kids from upper and middle-income families.[4]  What the district saves in this budget cycle on short-changing 4 year-olds will cost the school district and society many times that amount in the future.

Second, the Board will destroy, for at least one year, one of the true bright spots in the district when it reorganizes the Magnet schools. K-8 schools are advantageous for many reasons: continuity for students, collaboration amongst teachers, stable school culture, and a sense of community for all. 

By ripping away all of the kindergartens and putting them in one place, away from other kids in the same developmental stage, the people will save a few dollars. However, this is financially myopic and contrary to best educational practice. Part of education is foreword looking, a sense of transition, and the formation of possibilities. Without older students modeling academic growth – and possibly tutoring them- the kindergartners will loose valuable visions of development.  Furthermore, if the kindergarteners need advanced enrichment, where will they go?

The K-8 model will have the K removed and as a result, students arriving as first graders will not have the benefit of having teachers know them; they will not know the physical space, they will not know the culture and possibilities possible at the school; the unnecessary transition to a new environment will impede the education of many kids. First grade education, which is the foundation for future growth, will suffer as a result.

The ratified 2012-13 budget will transfer 155 students into the magnet schools, and this will effectively curtail the 1-8 into a 1-6.  The introduction of masses of new students into an established school will be destabilizing. Teachers will not know the students, and students will not know the school and all of its characteristics. These new students will be disoriented themselves and they will undermine the educational balance of the established school community. The 7^th and 8^th grades, now weighted beyond their natural structural size, will effectively be a mini-middle school.

This one-year budget will undermine so much of the stability generating and community building enabled by public schools. The much-lauded K-8 magnet schools will be dead, pre-schoolers will be stifled, and kindergartners and some middle schoolers will not have a stable learning community. We will be worse off as a result.

The vast majority of teacher slashing and education depleting school budgets across NYS passed on May 15^th, and this summons the specter of an ‘educational insolvency’ that the State Education Commissioner John King has raised[5]. Our country deserves better than austerity education for our children. However, by undermining the current system perhaps people will reflect upon how artificially fractured, unjust, antiquated and weak our education system is, and strive to create a modern and dynamic structure that will enrich all children and make our country safe and vibrant.

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[1]  http://www.cfr.org/united-states/us-education-reform-national-security/p27618, p.4.

[2] http://www.nyssba.org/clientuploads/nyssba_pdf/NYSSBA-NYSASBO-Budget-Report.pdf, p.4.

[3] http://www.schenectady.k12.ny.us/2012-2013_Budget/Budget_Proposal_Draft_2012-2013.pdf, p.4.

[4] I read this paper a decade ago when I was studying for my MAT at Union College, and the weight of its findings has weighted on me ever since.

[5] http://www.nyssba.org/clientuploads/nyssba_pdf/NYSSBA-NYSASBO-Budget-Report.pdf

Engineering Design for Pedestrians

It is essential that Schenectady incorporate the best pedestrian engineering design on all roads with heavy pedestrian and potentially heavy bicyclist traffic.


There is a discussion today in the Times about pedestrian and biking safety. One of the commentators addresses design, 2 focus on enforcement, while the last commentator reminds us that bikers need to follow the laws as well.  The design essay mentions raised pedestrian crosswalks; he probably means bridges over traffic, but changing the texture of the street before and on a cross walk would also slow down motorists and make them aware of pedestrian crossings.  He also cites Complete Streets an organization that advocates for streets designed for all, not just cars. http://www.completestreets.org/complete-streets-fundamentals/resources/

Engineering design for pedestrians:

http://www.walkinginfo.org/engineering/

Also a book in pdf from the Federal Highway Administration: 

http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/environment/sidewalk2/pdf.htm

the chapter on crosswalks with plenty of good ideas

http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/environment/sidewalk2/pdf/09chapter8.pdf 

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/02/27/reducing-traffic-fatalities-for-cyclists-and-pedestrians/it-starts-with-better-design

It Starts With Better Design

Peter Calthorpe is the author of "Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change" and a principal at the planning firm Calthorpe Associates in Berkeley, Calif.

FEBRUARY 27, 2012

Suburbs have reduced pedestrian and bike injuries by largely eliminating pedestrians and bikers a solution, but not a great one. Streets there are designed for cars, and other users are secondary. However, in New York City, pedestrians remain a powerful reality, and bikers are making a comeback. Policy and design must be combined to balance these groups’ claims on public space. “Complete Streets” — the idea that roads should be balanced in use and provide for user safety — is being pioneered in the city and supported by the federal Department of Transportation.

The answers are simple: create safe bike lanes, generous pedestrian spaces, protected crossings and narrow car lanes.

The “broken windows” strategy aims to change the character of places by policing a range of ambient activities. I agree that we need to intensify policing of auto infractions and make consequences for dangerous behavior more intense. But these policing efforts should be complemented by redesign of streets and reversal of the practice that has driven suburban land use: the more we design for cars, the less walkable, bikeable and enjoyable our streets become — and therefore the more we want to drive.

The answers are simple: create safe bike lanes, generous pedestrian spaces, protected, visible, and short crossings and narrow car lanes to slow traffic. Some Chinese cities are attempting to bring back bikers by building barriers to protect bike lanes, and in many European cities bike lanes are designated by much more than painted lines.

Another key to safety is slowing cars at intersections. Raised pedestrian crossings and “bulb-outs” that shorten crossings are good examples. Even more radical is the notion of auto-free streets: boulevards just for transit, bikers and pedestrians. New York City has the density and mix to justify many of these strategies.

Close to 40 percent of all land in our cities and towns is devoted to streets. They provide for much more than mobility: they carry essential utilities, they provide access for police and fire protection, and perhaps most important, they provide the ground for the social interaction that makes cities civil, exciting and convivial. Streets are the bedrock that makes cities great places to live. How we design and use them is a profound expression of who we are.

Create Cities for People, Not Cars

From what I have read about the much touted Erie Boulevard redevelopment- that includes no running water- it will not satisfy the new NYS legal requirements that all newly rehabbed streets include extensive pedestrian and bicyclist accommodations.

More can be done on Erie Boulevard, and all over Schenectady, to prevent senseless deaths. 

Create Cities for People, Not Cars