I have always appreciated the cool head and heart in a hot room. You know the person: something happens that others react emotionally to in fear and alarm, and the cool, calm, collected person brings confidence, peace, and hope to those around him or her. I appreciate the coolness, because that kind of calm creates…
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In his New York Times bestseller Love Does, Bob Goff proposes that “the language of love is laced with whimsy. It sometimes borders on the irrational. Like I’ve been saying, though, love is a do thing. It’s an energy that has to be dissipated.” “Whimsical” is not how most of us would think about love,…
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Building a new school has two distinct elements. The first: defining the academic program, creating the policies, procedures, and administrative backbone to lead an effective, efficient school. Here Waterloo leans heavily on educational and institutional ‘best practices’—from governance policies, financial practices, and research-based pedagogies and programs. It is why we are using CESA standards and NBOA to ground our…
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At the end of January, we were thrilled to take part in the GCSLS conference in San Antonio, a conversation among educators worldwide about the future of schooling in a world that is changing more rapidly every day. The theme of the conference was one near and dear to our Waterloo hearts: education must meet…
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Title: The City is the School—and Waterloo has a home in it! Waterloo School has a home! We have used “The city is the school” as a shorthand slogan for the kind of school we are building, one where teenagers discover how they can learn from and contribute to where they live. But this leads…
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Question: How does a school that hasn’t opened yet let students shadow school and learn what it will be like? Answer: Waterloo Experience Days! Through the winter we are holding Experience Days where students can experience a half day of school (one class), not as an observer, but as a student. Core to Waterloo is…
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I learned to cook at a Young Life camp in Canada from a dear friend who is an artist by personality, outlook, and talent, and who ran the kitchen accordingly. It was never dull and the food was amazing. One of her hallmark questions to us volunteers in the course of feeding 500 was ‘Do…
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Note: see below for opportunities to learn more about Waterloo It is final exam week in my home: the week before Christmas break when every student is preparing to cram a semester’s worth of material into their heads long enough to reproduce it on a two-hour test, and repeat again the next day. Why do…
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Note: see below for opportunities to learn more about Waterloo Many years ago a dear friend told me about a Christmas season tradition—to read Athanasius’ On the Incarnation as an Advent devotional. His tradition hasn’t replaced mine of using this excellent digital Advent devotional from BIOLA that draws on art, music, poetry and scripture to…
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Happy Thanksgiving! As we head into a holiday where we get some time from school for giving thanks, we want to reflect on how we spend time in school. Time is the commodity we take for granted until we don’t have enough of it. As our lives get faster and faster, without thinking we begin…
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