As our current families know, Beaver will become a 1:1 laptop community in 2009-10. In meeting the parents of newly admitted students on our re-visit days this month, I’ve explained that becoming a laptop community isn’t a radical change, but instead is intended to make “Beaver to be better at being Beaver.” Students won’t be online every minute of every class, but having laptops will open up channels of communication, collaboration and creativity that weren’t possible before the invention of Web 2.0 applications. Click

This week we had what I feel were the best opening faculty meetings in my (now) 17 years here. Members of our faculty lead workshops on Assessment, All Kinds of Minds and the 9th grade advising program, Best Practices for Collaboration and Web 2.0 and Education. In addition we heard from alumnae Beth Williams ’81 and Louise Russell ’63 on “Diversity as Good Business Sense” and Todd Frye from BCCJ

As progressive educators, we at Beaver continually ask ourselves what really constitutes intelligence and how that impacts learning and teaching. Unfortunately most of the educational establishment remains stuck on using various forms of standardized testing to quantify intelligence, even though it flies in the face

Thomas Edison created the electric lightbulb and then wrapped an entire industry around it. The lightbulb is most often thought of as his signature invention, but Edison understood that the bulb was little more than a parlor trick without a system of electric power generation and transmission to make it truly useful. So he created that, too.

An editorial by Peter Gow, Beaver’s Director of College Counseling, appears in the Commentary section of the online edition of Education Week (4/29/08). Entitled “The New Progressivism Is Here,” the article charts a renewed interest in progressive education among independent schools seeking to counteract what Mr. Gow terms

In the admission process, people often ask what progressive education really means today. My answer is that, unlike conventional and traditional education, it is based upon common sense.

Every student – every student – is a weak student. Even those students who navigate the worlds of writing, math and standardized testing in a seemingly effortless manner have weaknesses in areas of intelligence beyond those identified in the narrow view of conventional education.