Our
Projects

The Story of School Animated Video 

The Story of School puts our current system of schooling children into the deep historical context of life on this planet. The global crises that we face are not unique, they are similar to challenges that life has faced before. The same creativity and resilience that allowed our ancestors to survive are available to us today, if we figure out how to tap into it. Click on the picture of the title frame below to see the non-animated version. 

Equity vs. Equality: The Graphic Novel

Producing this graphic novel is a component of our public outreach efforts to influence the public conversation about how schools can get better at fulfilling the purposes they serve for society. This project redefines the term equity with more clarity and scientific precision, but in a story form that is easy to understand. 

Schooling for Holistic Equity:
How to Manage the Hidden Curriculum for K-12

Schooling for Holistic Equity is a comprehensive rethink of education based on a combination of 1) careful observation and analysis of successful holistic education and 2) the most thoroughly supported scientific model of motivation and engagement, Self-Determination Theory. It also contains a concise and coherent plan for bringing about large-scale systems-level change. A policy intervention is presented that can  encourage a diverse movement of grass-roots activists and innovators to make measurably successful gains on school climate measures. The policy intervention includes protecting these climate innovations from being undermined by bureaucratic forces. This unique composite came together because the author, Don Berg, has become an internationally recognized presenter on the theme of deeper learning, spent almost a decade in the trenches of political activism against industrial air pollution, and has over two decades of experience as an educator.

The original contributions to the education literature in this book include:

• a scientific theory of deeper learning 

• a clearer and more actionable definition of equity derived from the consensus definition presented by the National Academy of Sciences 

• a careful reconsideration of the State’s interest in learning, and 

• a variety of tools to enable schools to move away from bureaucracy and towards more self-management at multiple levels 

The book also contains a reinterpretation of the pendulum swings that have characterized education reforms over the past 150 years and how applying this new perspective to education can transcend that pattern.

The ultimate goal of this book is to enable our school system to achieve Holistic Equity by implementing the Back to Basics, Version 2.0 change strategy, empowering a diverse array of schools to demonstrate that they are each a Center for Catalytic Pedagogy. Each school will develop its own unique approach to Memetic Engineering which will be evaluated for success by producing a suite of relevant school climate data about the primary need supports provided by the school and the psychological patterns of need satisfaction, motivation, and engagement for faculty, staff, and students. The jargon terms in bold are, naturally, explained in the book.

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EDiE Fund for Equity Innovation

EDiE stands for Experiential Data in Education. This project is about shifting the fundamental management of schools from being guided by academic data to experiential data. Experiential data is derived from asking students and teachers about how they are engaged, what motivates them, and how well their primary psychological needs are being satisfied.