In this issue… Mastermind Mentors in action, Getting to “Y” project updates, the PBL Forum, … and more! Read More
Category: <span>UP Blog</span>
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UPdate for March 201 9
Vermont’s decision to shift from a traditional to a proficiency-based grading system is essential to ensuring all youth reach their full potential. It is my hope that the Vermont National Education Association’s request to push back the deadline for implementing proficiency-based graduation requirements to 2022 does not diminish a commitment to this change. Here is...
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UP for Learning on Shift Your Paradigm
Episode 030 – UP for Learning Interview with Helen Beattie and Clara Lew Smith
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GTY and YPAR for Jan 2019
Reading the Department of Health brief on “Adolescents Who Feel They Matter” recently led me to reflect on how grateful I am to have been involved in Getting to ‘Y’ (GTY) over the past decade, first as an advisor to a local GTY group and now as the coordinator for the initiative at UP for...
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Looking Back….Looking Forward
This new year provides and opportunity to both look back at our last decade of growth and look forward to the next 10 years. Like many nonprofits, we have been so busy working with schools, that we rarely back away to see the organization as a whole. The recent task of constructing an “Impact Statement”...
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Four Feet on the Ground: The Youth-Adult Partnership “Teeter-totter Effect” part 2
How can I expedite my school’s shift to youth-adult partnership? UP has been working for years to help youth-adult teams hone their partnerships. We recognize the “teeter-totter effect,” where one generation or the other may end up with an outsized share of power and leave the other hanging. We know it takes time to get...
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Four Feet on the Ground: The Youth-Adult Partnership “Teeter-totter Effect”
The personalization of learning requires the relationship of students and teachers to shift to partnership and shared responsibility. Educational change in Vermont has also opened the door to unprecedented opportunities for young people to be central to change, rather than passive recipients. However, there are few roadmaps for shifting our mental models and practices to...
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A Fresh Look at “Claiming an Education”
The latest raging debates about women’s place in our society feel disorienting and dangerous to a lot of people. To some of us who came of age a half-century ago, when we stepped into the women’s movement at the same time we entered womanhood itself, there’s now a sense of having come adrift. Things we...
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Not Teaching Alone
by Alexandra Muck, Middlebury College This summer, I attended the multi-day International Seminar on Amplifying Student Voice & Partnership, (find the blog at https://blog.uvm.edu/stuvoice) which received major support from the awesome people at UP for Learning. I was at the crossroads between student and teacher, kid and adult, having graduated from college in February. At...
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“Our Time” Revisited
I just can’t get it out of my head… “It’s our time, our place, our pace. Choice and voice, we co-create.” Almost two years ago a group of young people from schools around the state convened to compose a song that captured their vision of education. Once the song was ready, Vermont students of all...