Education is an investment of time, life's scarcest resource. No matter who you are, you only have about 6,000 waking hours in a year. By the age of seven or eight, school officially occupies about 1,000 of those hours.
The use of time in education is the focus of Ed100 Chapter 4, the Ed100 Chapter of the Month for November-December. This post is the fourth of ten for the Ed100 Chapter of the Month Program, our biggest effort yet to help parent leaders make a lasting difference in their schools and districts.
What is the right age for children to begin learning? When kids go to school, how should their time be used? Small class sizes help focus students' time on learning, but they are costly. What's known about that? How can classes be structured to make the best use of time? Time "off" from learning, for summers or after school, creates huge inequalities in school; are there ways around it? How do schools help families get their kids to school? And where does time on homework fit in? Why does "block scheduling" seem to help?
The lessons of Chapter 4 delve into these topics and others related to time. As always, the very best way to learn from these lessons is to discuss them. To help you get the conversation going we've prepared discussion guides in English and Spanish. Each chapter is matched with a brief summary video that you can use to bring everyone into the conversation (even if they haven't actually read the lessons). Here's the discussion guide for Chapter 4 in English and Spanish:
Each month of this school year we are featuring one chapter of Ed100 through email and social media. It's all scheduled. This month (November-December) we are featuring Chapter 4.
Each lesson of Ed100 includes a simple quiz. For Lesson 4.6, the quiz looks like this:
By completing the quizzes, you earn tickets, which help you in two ways.
First, they count toward your Ed100 Graduate Certificate, which you earn by completing the quiz for each lesson in Ed100.
Second, tickets count as chances to win in the next drawing, which is coming up on December 10. If you're lucky, a ticket you earn could win $1,000! for your PTA!
The Ed100 drawing is a great tool for creating urgency. If you are trying to get an Ed100 group going in your school group or PTA council, a short presentation can help make it clear.
Your board members might not be the only ones interested in becoming Ed100 Graduates this year. If you have the opportunity to speak to your school community, why not invite them to join you? Tell them about your PTA board's plan to use the Ed100 Chapter of the Month.
You might also want to draw inspiration from the Ed100 Big Book of Questions, an ever-evolving public set of question slides for ALL of the lessons in Ed100. The slides don't give away the answers, but they tell you where to find them.
How can we help you succeed with Ed100? Drop me an email or leave a comment on this blog post! I'm [email protected].
P.S. Thanks to our friends at the San Mateo County Office of Education for translating ALL of our Discussion Guides into Spanish.
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