New High School Business Incubator Funds Teen Entrepreneurs

What made it special? The entrepreneurs were all juniors and sophomores at Barrington High School in Barrington, Ill., who spent this school year attending what organizers believe is the first lean-principles business incubator program based on a high school campus.

The program was born after two local entrepreneurs, Michael Miles and Karl Fruecht, pushed for a high school entrepreneurship course. The students’ year-long startup curriculum was based on the “lean launchpad” principles taught by Stanford entrepreneurship professor and The Startup Owner’s Manualauthor Steve Blank, which stress rapid iteration to find a viable business idea.

The students generated over 31 startup concepts, from which the best five were culled to present at a star-studded pitch event hosted by stock trader and CNBC personality Jim Iurio. Both individual investors and the school’s Barrington 220 Educational Foundation invested in the winning companies.

The startup to win the most funding was FMB Technology, which received $25,000 for its “Find My Bus” tracking app.

Also gaining substantial funding: FantasTech Tutors, which employs teens to teach tech skills to seniors. The team sought $10,000, but local businessman Jim Cerkleski, CEO and founder of global recycling companyClover Technologies Group, thought the concept had so much potential he gave them $15,000 for a 10 percent stake.

“This is like [Best Buy's] Geek Squad for teens, with teens teaching adults,” he says. “They already have clients, which is what got me excited.”

Wasn’t Cerkleski nervous about handing over a chunk of change that size to young teens? Not at all. He says he received a similar amount at a young age to start Clover, and wanted to give another entrepreneur the same opportunity.

Other winners:

Virtual collaborative study site The Study Projects received $20,000 from a mix of private investors and the Educational Foundation

Warrior Wipes, which offers a medical-grade cleaning wipe for sports equipment, received $10,000. And nonprofit TechWurk, which matches charities with free Web-design help, received $5,000 from the foundation.

Rethinking College ROI: The Rewards Of Meaningful Student-Professor Relationships

New research can be important not only when it breaks new ground, but also when it reconfirms core truths at just the right time.

That’s the case with the recent Gallup/Purdue survey of 30,000 college graduates, which shows that students who have at least one formative relationship with a professor later become the most “engaged” professionals – those who are the most “deeply involved in, enthusiastic about, and committed to their work” and their field.

This study speaks personally to me, because lessons learned in college have made me bring more to every job I’ve held since 1983. For example, the formidableGeorgetown English professor Timothy Healy, S.J., taught me to read poems from multiple openings and to write with as much care as the poets we studied. History professor Michael Foley gave me an example of integrity that still resides in the front of my mind, sometimes as a prod. The Oxford don Julia Briggs helped me grasp the importance of developing my own methodology, my own lens, as a cultural critic or commentator.

 

Each of these teachers has been gone for more years than we spent together, but they remain present in the ways I think and speak, in how I deal with new problems, and in the drive that brings me back into the office after a bad day ready to do better.

Not that I got to know any of them to enhance my career. In fact, it was exactly the opposite. I went to these scholars for the intrinsic meaning of having my questions engaged, my ideas considered, my writing parsed, and my talents taken seriously. It’s precisely because I sought growth for its own sake that my teachers’ lessons have stayed with me all these years, emerging as I get older, like a Polaroid picture slowly coming into focus.

The Gallup/Purdue study labels all this as “emotional support,” which isn’t quite right. We’re not talking about counseling, though that’s crucial too. We’re talking about long-term intellectual experiences that can make and mold a free mind right up to the moment we think our own last thoughts.

Earlier this month, New York Times columnist Charles Blow wrote movinglyabout a professor at Grambling State University who helped launch him into journalism. And when ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos addressed the graduates of Franklin & Marshall College this year, he spoke about the enduring impact of professors Richard Pious and Charles Hamilton, without whom he might never have succeeded as a presidential aide or a political analyst.

We hear such testimony again and again when alumni make gifts in honor of their professors or reconnect with them at reunions or on their children’s college tours. America may be obsessed by college rankings, bowl games, and bumper stickers, but at the heart of things – at the moral core of the enterprise – the substantive, mentoring relationships matter most. With the country looking to various forms of mass education as a way to decrease college costs, we must not forget the power and value in the mind-to-mind contact of two working brains – one young, one learned, both searching and connecting across the generations.

There’s a message for everyone in the Gallup/Purdue research:

To faculty, it’s to believe in and advocate for the value of our role. In each moment with our students we have the chance to shape positively what those young people go on to know and strive for and become.

To higher education leaders, it’s to make sure we organize our institutions so faculty have the time and resources to teach to the individual – and that means making sure all students have access to small classes and many get the chance to do research with scholars.

To funders of all types, it’s to make sure we protect the longer-term returns-on-investment that a great college education provides, and secure the quality of American higher education for generations to come.

And most important, to students, the ringing message is to seek out the faculty. Take the most challenging professors. Pose questions in class. Go see your teachers in office hours. Ask how they chose their careers or what has changed in their fields. There’s gold in these relationships – but you have to take the initiative.

The Gallup/Purdue study performs the public service of returning our focus to abiding principles about what makes a college education count.

And so it seems fitting to give the final word to my former professor, Fr. Healy: “The old teach and the young dream, and in that mystery comes a tomorrow that we who are older will never know but will have helped to shape in the minds and hearts of our students.”

Daniel R. Porterfield, Ph.D. is the 15th president of Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa. Follow him on twitter @danporterfield

Acquiring an Appreciation of Eagle Rock’s Graduate Higher Education Fund

n Eagle Rock’s early years, students would graduate in proper circumstance — if not pomp — only to face seemingly impossible financial barriers in their efforts to move on. Having earned their diplomas and eagerly looking forward to grander goals, these confident students often found their promising futures thwarted by monetary constraints that prevented them from financing further education.

What it came down to was students who wanted to go to college — and they could get into college — but they just didn’t have the support, according to Robert Burkhardt, our founder and former Head of School.

By the summer of 1997, Burkhardt and Dick Herb, who was then our director of operations, came up with the beginnings of a plan. Herb found some money in the budget that enabled Burkhardt  to bequeath a thousand dollars to one graduate.

But it quickly became obvious that all of our graduates deserved a financial opportunity, so the next trimester, we granted the same award to all graduates. Nice sentiment, but in order to make the fund sustainable, we had to come up with a fund-raising operation.

We began to hire the school out for Eagle Serve once a trimester, and then became involved with the Estes Park Duck Race organization. And volunteers began sending out letters to people, asking for monetary support.

When Judy Gilbert, Eagle Rock’s first director of curriculum passed away, the American Honda Education Corporation donated $50,000 in her honor to seed the Eagle Rock Graduate Higher Education Fund.

And as more money flowed in and the fund grew even more sustainable, we began to raise the award amount. Today, the Graduate Higher Education Fund award stands at $14,000 per student. Moreover, the award applies retroactively, enabling every graduate access to the current amount of funding awarded.

Eagle Rock Grad, Reynaldo Benally

Even today, the fund continues to grow, with the most recent windfall coming from Eagle Rock’s Music & Theater Department, which raised $2,035 through “pay as you like” admission sales for four performances of In The Heights earlier this year.While many Eagle Rock students have used their education award for community college or college tuition, other graduates have used the fund for more creative purposes. Matt Rutherford used his to get his captain’s license that enabled him to sail solo around North and South America. Reynaldo Benally is currently using his award to obtain his English teaching license in Istanbul, Turkey.

Eagle Rock School graduate Yesenia Ayala is using her award to pay for a laptop computer so she can take some extra courses. She tells us that while she receives financial aid to pay standard tuition, it doesn’t help with extra academic and living expenses.

Acknowledging the growing costs of higher education, we hope that the fund will someday grow to $30,000 or higher. But whether that goal is achieved or not, Eagle Rock grads know they have a healthy head start on their advanced education through these fund-raising efforts. And that goes a long way toward maintaining that confidence that’s acquired when they receive that high school diploma

Our Students Make Beautiful Music Together — Behind the PDC Building

Sometimes living together in a close-knit community can be a taxing proposition, and students need to find ways to become rejuvenated and eager to move onto the next step in their educational path.

For quite a few of our Eagle Rockers, the small building nestled behind the Professional Development Center (PDC) is nothing short of a haven. It’s our one-room schoolhouse — a place for musicians to gravitate for the purpose of recording music

Surrounded by countless musical instruments, a small recording studio, computers filled with music software and a pair of talented instructors, our music department boasts significant opportunities and resources. And certainly not the least of these is our partnership with Berklee College of Musicin Boston.

As part of the Berklee City Music Network (BCMN), Eagle Rock students have access to additional musical opportunities. BCMN is a nonprofit network dedicated to supporting underserved youth through contemporary music.

Isaac Leslie, our music instructional specialist, said that with Eagle Rock as its partner site, BCMN delivers the musical proficiency and financial resources needed for students to succeed at a prestigious institution like Berklee College of Music. He said the purpose is to bring these resources to students who would not otherwise have the opportunity to attend a school like Berklee.

The partnership includes two main assets: the PULSE music method and the City Music Summer Scholarship. The PULSE (Pre-University Learning System Experience) curriculum is the core of the partnership, according to Leslie. An online curriculum in music theory, musicianship skills, and ear training, the program is individualized and can accommodate different instruments.

This is a big help at Eagle Rock, where student musicians who are interested in going to college for music don’t necessarily have the musicianship skills — things like reading music notation — that are necessary to be admitted and to succeed at an institution like Berklee.

Through the City Music Summer Scholarship, two Eagle Rock students have the opportunity to attend a five-week summer program at the college in Boston. Students audition for those spots in the winter, and the recipients of the scholarship spend half of their summer trimester studying at Berklee.

Song Candea, who attended Berklee last summer, said the Eagle Rock experience was similar to being in a college for music. He said it forced him to be independent and to hold himself accountable in different ways. While he grew as a musician, he said the experience of working with other talented artists pushed him to grow personally.

Students who both complete the summer program and use the PULSE curriculum are eligible to compete for a full-tuition scholarship to attend Berklee upon graduation. Additionally, Eagle Rock students, faculty and graduates can take online Berklee College courses at a discount, and Berklee faculty have come to campus periodically to teach Explore Week classes.

Last year, BCMN presented six awards in three categories to partner schools during its Network Conference held in Memphis, Tenn. Eagle Rock took home two of these awards — the Outstanding Partnership Award and Emerging Leadership Award.

It’s just another benefit of Eagle Rock participating with one of the world’s most respected colleges of contemporary music.

Tags: Berklee City Music Network, Berklee College of Music, Isaac Leslie, Mary Reid Munford,PULSE Music Method

Focus on STEM Education: Student Projects Amaze

At the recent 2014 White House Science Fair, President Obama met with students who were working on projects such as a cure for a form of liver cancer, and using gel in helmets to prevent sports concussions, according to Bloomberg.com. More than 100 students from 30 different states participated in the fair.  "Every one of the young people I met here is amazing," President Obama said to the group. "It reminds us there is so much talent to be tapped, if we're all working together." The fair was part of the Obama Administration's focus on STEM. As part of that focus, a $35 million Department of Education competition aims to train 100,000 new teachers. The Administration also plans to expand the Americorps volunteer program in order to provide STEM education to 18,000 low-income students.  Read the full story - See more at: http://www.educationworld.com/a_news/obama-administration-promotes-stem-and-other-initiatives#sthash.qjddADxw.dpuf

Teachers, how would you like to be observed?

As Ofsted faces yet more challenges over the validity of lesson observations, teacher Ross Morrison McGill asks the profession how they would like to develop

Do you think lesson observations should be scrapped? What model could replace them? Photograph: Alamy

If you've been swamped under your lesson plans, exams and marking for too long, you might have missed the current insurgency taking place around lesson observations.
Back in March, the thinktank Policy exchange recommended Ofsted abandon its "unreliable and invalid" methods of observing classroom lessons during school inspections. More recently, Sam Freedman, a former policy adviser who is now head of research at Teach First, also argued that lesson observations should be scrapped. Even the updated Ofsted guidance from February 2014 repeated that inspectors must not give the impression that Ofsted favours a teaching style.
The catch-22 with lesson observations is that they're formulated for several purposes – appraisal policy, peer-to-peer development and for monitoring sub-standards of teaching – using the Ofsted criteria. Where we have all gone wrong, is that we have adapted this whole-school framework for individual one-off lesson judgements, which has created a culture of judging teachers and has fixated the profession on defining ourselves by a grade.
A second issue is that to observe precisely and offer sophisticated feedback for improvement, requires a certain level of experience and proficiency. We can all observe lessons and state that the lesson was "good", but without clear cognition, it is tricky to define what actually constitutes "good teaching". This can make judgements very abstract and those observing often turn to dialogue and additional sources of evidence provided after the lesson itself. These other sources of information then become the criteria for us to make judgements more accurately.
Professor Rob Coe of Durham University, recently presented two key issues for observers. The first concerns reliability and "the extent to which the judgements made independently by two observers who see the same lesson would agree". The seconds is validity – "if you get a high rating, does it mean you are an effective teacher?"
He presents information in Measures of Effective Teaching (MET), a research partnership that analyses five critical research areas to train people to become qualified observers and make judgements. These areas are: student achievement, classroom observations, teachers' pedagogical content knowledge, student perceptions and the teachers' perceptions. He asks: "The belief that we know good teaching when we see it is so strong that it is a real challenge to be told that research does not support it."
But I believe one can observe learning. It may be difficult to measure this visually, but I do not believe it is invisible, although I'm happy to be proven wrong.
Over the past three years at my school, we've worked with staff to improve the reliability and validity of lesson judgements. What we have found to work very well is being flexible with appraisal and formal observations. As long as learning is happening – teachers having teaching and learning dialogue – then we can start to focus on what is most important – sophisticated, precise feedback for improving the teacher and the learning.
We'll also be revisiting our training model so that all staff are empowered to give accurate feedback, have difficult conversations and focus much more on improving rather than box-ticking. Within this, we are debating whether or not to keep judging lessons at all.
Plenty of blogs from schools and headteachers state the benefits of scrapping lesson judgements. But it will take a generation for lesson judgements to be removed, and in the meantime, I'd like to see observations containing much more emphasis on peer-dialogue and much less focus on criterion-referenced judgements. More teacher-owned data must to be taken into account, as well as student conversations and evidence in books – such as marking, homework and re-drafting work. This would provide a much fairer system for the profession, in making a more reliable and valid assessment of the teaching.
An observer also needs experience in the classroom. Teacher dialogue is crucial if observers are to provide unbiased and pinpointed feedback for them; the lack of sophisticated, observational feedback, is much worse than a culture of judging teaching. Maybe it is time we move away from judgements and ask ourselves how would we like to be observed and challenged to develop? If you were a headteacher, what would you do in your school if you knew who was a good/poor teacher? How would you help them improve without a judgement? The comments thread is open for your thoughts and ideas.
Ross Morrison McGill is an award winning teacher and assistant headteacher. He is author of 100 Ideas: Outstanding Lessons. You can follow him on Twitter @TeacherToolkit or read his blog here.