Celebration of Fernadina Chan
On Saturday, June 23, we celebrated a remarkable woman and educator as she retired from BAA: Fernadina Chan. I have the privilege of working with some of the most amazing teachers at Boston Arts Academy, and it was an honor to celebrate Fern at The Boston Conservatory...
Intervention into Personalization
One of the ten common principles of the Coalition of Essential Schools is personalization. This is explained as: “Teaching and learning should be personalized to the maximum feasible extent… the goal is that no teacher has direct responsibility for more than 80...
Alvin Ailey
Saturday's Boston Globe ran an article on the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (they performed at the Citi Wang Theatre Thursday through Sunday last week.) Many may not have known that two Alvin Ailey dancers (Kirven Boyd and Belen Estrada) are graduates of Boston...
Boston Marathon
Boston Arts Academy is now in our second year of a three-year relationship with the Boston Athletic Association as an official charity of the Boston Marathon... We have a dynamic team of 15 running the marathon on Monday, April 16- they have already raised over...
OLA Workshop at BAA’s Center for Arts in Education
Last week, BAA’s Center for Arts in Education hosted Darcy Rogers for a full-day workshop on her Organic Language Acquisition (OLA) technique. I first met Darcy at her school, Crater Renaissance Academy in Oregon, and then I ran into her again at the Coalition of...
Occupy the DOE
I have just returned from Washington, DC, and the Occupy the DOE rally. Cassie Wallace, our second-year math teacher, was my impetus to go. She posted on our Teaching/Learning email conference back in February: In case anyone is interested in protesting in DC with me...
Twelfth Night
Last week was a big one for our theatre department, and for the school! Not only did theatre students make it to the semifinals at the state drama festival (the first time we’ve ever participated), but we had an amazing collaboration with Actors' Shakespeare Project...
Arts Education Needs to be Protected
Monday’s piece in the Globe by Mayor Menino and Laura Perille "Arts Education Needs to be Protected" highlights Boston’s wonderful efforts to bring access to a high-quality arts education to all of its students. As the article cites, and as I write in my recent...
Instructional Rounds
Last Thursday we hosted Instructional Rounds (IR) at BAA. Instructional rounds are the new buzzword in education, largely defined by Lee Teitel and Richard Elmore at Harvard. The purpose of the rounds is to analyze and improve teaching and learning practices at the...
Stonehill College
Last night I had the opportunity to speak to a group of emerging young educators at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts. Stonehill Professor Karen Anderson (the wife of a Boston Public Schools science educator- small world!) assigns “The Hardest Questions...