Seven Ashland Middle School teachers and Charter Council member Amy Syverson recently traveled to Appleton to visit Kaleidoscope Academy and Valley New School. The teachers included representatives from the 6th, 7th, 8th, Special Ed., and Related Arts teams.
Kaleidoscope is a public charter middle school, sharing space and services with a traditional middle school. While their primary focus is fine arts, they also do a lot of inquiry-based projects in the core academics. The staff was very friendly and answered our many questions about how a charter school and a traditional middle school coexist in their building.
We also visited Valley New School, a 7-12 public charter school doing fully student-directed PBL, similar to TAGOS in Janesville. Again, we were incredibly impressed by the maturity of the students, the scope of the learning, and the structures and systems they had in place. VNS was an example of how different a school can be from the traditional model and still provide an outstanding education to its students.
http://www.aasd.k12.wi.us/Kaleidoscope/
http://valleynewschool.com/
Kaleidoscope is a public charter middle school, sharing space and services with a traditional middle school. While their primary focus is fine arts, they also do a lot of inquiry-based projects in the core academics. The staff was very friendly and answered our many questions about how a charter school and a traditional middle school coexist in their building.
We also visited Valley New School, a 7-12 public charter school doing fully student-directed PBL, similar to TAGOS in Janesville. Again, we were incredibly impressed by the maturity of the students, the scope of the learning, and the structures and systems they had in place. VNS was an example of how different a school can be from the traditional model and still provide an outstanding education to its students.
http://www.aasd.k12.wi.us/Kaleidoscope/
http://valleynewschool.com/
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