It will come as no surprise to folks that I’m a complete NPR-head. WAMU is on more or less around the clock at our house, in our car, and when I was at home with very small kids, it was a sanity saver. I consider public radio to be one of the great good things of the universe, and this was proved again this week when I happened to catch a story on a high school that teaches Thoreau in the woods. It’s part of a year-long NPR series on Innovative Trends in High Schools.
Over the coming year, NPR will visit high schools around the country that are trying to break a pattern of failure. Education Correspondent Larry Abramson will bring you stories from schools big and small that are trying out new ideas.
You can click here to visit the main series page, which has links to all the stories so far, RSS feed buttons, and a link to let NPR know of “a high school in your community that’s trying something new.”
Frankly, a lot of the ideas sound like they borrow heavily from approaches being used by homeschoolers/unschoolers. It’s refreshing to see institutions responding to new understanding of how teens learn, and questioning what it will mean to be educated in the future.
