Educational Reform? Starting Where it Matters.

by William Rossi
Thumbnail image for Educational Reform? Starting Where it Matters.

Many students turn away from education and actually turn against it because they are not engaged, stimulated, or motivated and because it is not an opportunity for self-development or healing. Education should encourage self-discovery and enable students to engage with themselves and think for themselves. It should fill the students’ emotional needs along with the [...]

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The Rossi Approach: Harnessing Creativitythrough Arts Mentoring

by Mary Helen Rossi

The Rossi approach stimulates, develops and nurtures the creative process in teachers and students alike. It’s a specific, hands-on approach (not theoretical or academic) that provides you with the the tools and orientations you need to actively creative a life worth living — for yourself and your students. Using this approach, you’ll learn how to: teach [...]

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Arts Mentoring is Empowerment

by Diane Allsman

The Merge approach provides a vision of hope in others’ potential for success –and the tools needed to empower someone to find their way, their personal path – the ultimate goal of every recognized Human Being. First we have to recognize, validate a person – give them a taste of what it feels like to [...]

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The Teacher as a Model of a Joyful Life

by Mary Helen Rossi

Years ago, as a volunteer for a non-profit arts organization, I wrote a grant request to a national foundation that funds programs that create joy through rhythm. While reflecting on how the program I was writing about cultivated and nourished students so they began to experience feelings of joy, I gained a new perspective on [...]

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Evaluation and Assessment make my life easier ... and make me a better teacher

by Dawn Mehan

I have not experienced myself as a particularly organized person as of yet. So needless to say, I wasn’t thrilled to know that evaluations with the SETS software were a part of what was an otherwise inspiring teaching career with MERGE. I have always know that better organization will ideally make me more focused, but [...]

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The Value of a Creative Educational Environment

by William Rossi

I think we need to broaden the current perspective of what constitutes an educational environment. Actually, since children and youth are constantly learning, everything that goes on around them is an educational environment—adults and peers are their teachers, for better or worse. Unfortunately today’s environment contains many negatives. Hopefully in time we’ll realize the meaning [...]

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Standards-Based Education (2)

by William Rossi

As I suggested in my first post on standards-based education, the focus on imposed knowledge greatly minimizes students’ chances to develop into whole human beings. Imposed knowledge never becomes real knowledge—that can only come from within a person. By teaching primarily information, education can break the spirits of students who learn differently or have learning [...]

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Standards-based Education: Suffocation?

by William Rossi

With its focus on a narrow, one dimensional performance, standards-based education not only misses the point, it compounds the mistakes of traditional education by discouraging and repelling those students who can’t relate. One explanation for this is that in its drive to be efficient, standards-based education often approaches students as if they all learn in [...]

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