Morning Metro: Oakhurst Puts Students in Charge, a Six-Figure Home on Lullwater, and a Public Toilet Success Story
Decatur Metro | January 25, 2012- Oakhurst Elementary tries out student-led parent/teacher conferences [Champion]
- Panda Express opening near Northlake Mall [TNT]
- The forgotten history of Access Atlanta, one of the early web’s most innovative papers [Neiman Journo Lab]
- Long neglected, historic “The 750″ apartments on Ponce to be renovated [Patch]
- Cobb wants transit money switched to fund toll lanes [AJC]
- A house for sale on Lullwater for under $1 million?? [Curbed]
- Atlanta ranks as fourth most literate city in U.S. [USAT]
- Why Portland’s public toilets succeeded while others failed [Atlantic Cities]
I went to one of the student-led conferences at Oakhurst, for my son in Kindergarten. It was really nice: he showed off his reading (reading a short book and talking about his strategies for figuring out words), his math (doing a couple of addition and subtraction problems), plus telling me a few facts about the U.S. flag. He got into it and was proud of how he had done, I got a nice sense of the things he had been doing, and it took just about 10 minutes.
Go Owls!
I agree. It was a wonderful experience for kids and parents!
This does sound great. I have always been surprised that routine parent/teacher conferences for all children were not standard for all schools. Depending on the school, sometimes they only occur if requested by the parents. I hope this proactive model gets extended somehow to the middle and high school levels as well where it’s even more important for students to take a lead role in their learning. I realize that it’s a challenge there because multiple teachers are involved and it would be a tremendous burden for just 3 or 4 counselors to do all of them. But I wonder if there’s a way to divvy up the students among the entire school leadership and have a reasonable load–e.g. principal, vice-principal(s), counselors, instructional leads, IB coordinators, etc.
Note that the “most literate” ranking has nothing to do with actual literacy rates. DeKalb, for instance, has a high percentage of functionally illiterate adults.